A morning, Sunday at that,
in late January and a tree,
a Chinese tallow, leafless,
vulnerable.  As if from nowhere,
from the bowels of darkening clouds,
they descend by the hundreds,
turning the tree into nothing
but a blue-black cacophony
of terror, a choir of wildest eyes
darting this way and that,
desperate for something, anything,
to scavenge, tightening its grip
on the twigs of a fall from Eden.