Haibun with Birds

Airport. Full moon. Pre-dawn.

Travelers arrive as a flock then disperse singular, paired, in families of three, four. They sit in rows, static as seagulls in a parking lot. Fingers picking at cellphones that chirp like tree frogs. Boarding calls from the ceiling tin the air.  The flock reconfigures in a sleight of hand, gather like starlings. They pool, curve, cleave, become a feathered river merging, emulating estuary, tide, blackcaps. At twenty thousand feet they reshape into a silver heron rowing across the sky, some kind of cumulative shadow shrouded, cloaked in clouds. If they are not of the air, what’s left to claim as their defining element? Answer me, Icarus. Inform me, you frigate birds. Show me, you migrating Sand Hill cranes.

Author of the article

Robert Miltner’s literary nonfiction and lyrical essays have appeared in Los Angeles Review, Diagram, Great Lakes Review, Pithead Chapel, Juxtaprose, Kestrel, Del Sol Review, Hawai’i Pacific Review, as well as Eastern Iowa Review, and has been nominated for a Best of the Net and a Pushcart prize in nonfiction. His books of prose poetry are Hotel Utopia (New Rivers Press, 2011) and Orpheus & Echo (Etruscan Press, forthcoming in 2020) and his collection of short fiction is And Your Bird Can Sing (Bottom Dog Press, 2014). A professor emeritus of English at Kent State University Stark and the Northeast Ohio MFA in Creative Writing, he edits the Raymond Carver Review. For more related work, visit http://www.portyonderpress.com/robert-miltner---narrow-roads-north-nine-haibun.html