Smoke and swifts

Swifts

The boys below the basketball hoop aiming
for the circle of air it describes
do not notice a sky full of birds swirling
above the playground in eccentric loops
around the chimney of the school.

As sunset blood washes into gray river of dusk, swift
follows swift in fluttering ellipses chuckling
at their own scrawling choreography, flirting
between the brick cave and rising half moon,

Until one, then fifty agree to drop
like leaves with landing gear into the sooty column,
into a funnel through which hundreds disappear,
folding charcoal wing against wing,
while a few wheel away for their last rotations
each feather testing each space they fly.

--Ellen Mendoza.

As I escorted my old friends around Portland, they couldn't see Mt. Hood and the other mountains that surround us. We could smell the problem: wildfires and a west wind blowing smoke toward the city. After the longest wet spell in history this past spring, we've had an unusually dry summer. None of us are complaining, as we expect we'll have the usual eight months of rain, but at the moment the wild lands are crackling with dry grasses.

The air quality for humans has declined from Good to Moderate, but it's the time of the annual swift migration, and I worry for their tiny lungs. They mass all around my neighborhood every night in September before descending into the chimney at Chapman School, and if you look closely at the top of the frame of this picture taken from the building where I live, you can see many of them zooming through the smoky haze.