Relaying Flight

RELAYING FLIGHT

The flighty way the intrepid bird moves
as it flits ahead of my flat-driving bicycle
over the plains, the salt-laken causeway,
in its landings, perched a paused moment
on some chosen fencepost before going on
again across the wet-n-treeless grassland,

stopping,
only to go a further way,
and again;

puts me in mind of that free more formal poem
where flight is versed up to be sung line by line
in stretched phrases drawn of a wildly anxious
equanimity comes at last to its wide wingends
in that upward flourish when the hunterbird
rises to its flight rescue in a sheltering tree.