Curve

by Rachel Trousdale

All along it hasn’t been birds
but the parabolic rise
of bird into air; the upwards curve
as hop becomes lift, 
the air-tracery of flight. I thought it was birds,
that the leap of my heart 
was attuned to hollow bones, jay’s wings
scattering light as air does, unpigmented blue refraction;
I thought I felt communion with the wren, gull, lark,
the unstinting intelligence of crows—
but here is the same curve in white water
in a mountain stream, flinging itself up and up
over boulders after a night of rain.
It’s the shape the snow made, the day
our son was born: you working 
to clear our path, the flakes flying again, joyful
illusions of ease, from your shovel.

::

Rachel Trousdale’s poems have appeared in The Nation, The Yale Review, and Diagram. Her first poetry collection, Five-Paragraph Essay on the Body-Mind Problem, was selected by Robert Pinsky as the winner of the Cardinal Poetry Prize, and will be published by Wesleyan University Press in 2025. Her latest scholarly book is Humor, Empathy, and Community in Twentieth-Century American Poetry.

Image: Sunguk Kim

ID: a dove taking off.