Swifts Storming St. Catherine's Church

Watching the swifts storm St. Catherine’s Church,

its lofty walls raised of brick and white stone

—an unfinished basilica, earthquakes

and fires beset it, the transept

and tower were never built—I thought:

the swifts in their mad, haphazard, grand

attack on the Gothic structure and in their whistles,

shrill and coarse, utterly un-human,

competing with cell ringtones

and singing blackbirds, giving their final concert,

are the image of ecstasy, but not ecstasy itself,

they can’t be, they don’t want to be—

they aren’t John of the Cross or Catherine of Alexandria

or Catherine of Siena, they know neither fullness nor void,

doubt and pursuit, despair and rapture.

These swifts are of the species Apus apus,

they resemble swallows but share

no kinship, they’re unable

to navigate on land, they know only one thing—flight,

only the endless soaring overhead

that demands a spectator both slightly sober

and a little touched, they need an eye and a heart;

the eye must trace the trajectories of dark missiles,

the trail of a spaceship smashed

into tiny shards of dark nervous matter,

and the heart must sustain them with what it cannot

lack, enthusiasm, and thus fortified,

the swifts and the observer’s heart join for a brief moment

in an unlikely contract, in admiration

for a world that has decided on a late June evening,

so it seems, to reveal before us, nonchalantly,

one of its zealously kept secrets

before night returns, mosquitoes and ignorance,,

and my life, unfinished, uncertain,

made of joy and fear, of ceaseless,

unsated curiosity, what’s coming next;

but now the day’s shutters bang closed

(and I’ve already said too much).