Amid a conflicting report a nuthatch fetches a black fly, dips its plume in stagnant pool. This is a sky drawn, grafted, rescued, not a bath of vapors an afternoon shutters with counterfeit meaning. It is just an incident within a field of possibility, something periodic and bruised, one location in which we grip that instant of contact. Upstream a scarecrow is ragged in the wounding, a music of terror barely rises above the slopes, reft with nothing but its melody’s radius, the slow ancient call of the bird in the distant flicker.