Vortex

The town’s trees, roomy with winter, have begun

of late to fill with them, a settling

that commences with dusk. The widows complain —

claim they can smell them, can hear them shuffling

in the trees, a wing hitting a branch a sound

sharp, they say, as ice cracking. They cannot

sleep. And so you form a committee, convening

with shotguns to fire every night into the darkling

congregation. Every night, the air resounds

with that resolve, and every dusk they return

with theirs, circle, a lazy familiar vortex

around a drain, an old appointment they keep

with an inescapable place; this argument

no way, Claude says, to be any less afraid.