Great Blue

The way he flaps down into the yard, this gray spindled kite, dragging a length of shadow behind him, Pleistocenean angel, hungered by all the years of his absence for the darting Koi in our tub-sized pond. We watch him from our breakfast table, strewn as usual with cereal bowls and cold toast, as he heaves those almost broken shoulders down through the trees, and lands, or rather half-falls on the rocks by the water's reedy edge. And the rest of us, we stand at the breath-fogged window, mouthing forgotten alphabets, another American family rung full by this grand visitation- breakfast spoons and butter knives in hand, floral PJs hoisted up, as though company had come and we'd just put on our finery. My daughters started jigging right there in the kitchen, kicking up their knees and flailing their small arms, as though pithed by a hot shard. I'd seen it before, the way the world sneaks up and up-ends them, the way light flashes into them, or some creature spied at the top of a hill fissures right down into their bones. Once my daughter, only ten-months old, followed the shine of a copper beetle from our stooped front step to the horse farm at the county line. And then, years later, her sister, not much more than two, climbed thirty-feet into a tulip poplar. We found her dozing in the rooted tangle of a squirrel's nest, fists clenched with nuts, hair tufted up and streaked with gray. And when they vanish quick as a held breath from the room no one is surprised. And when they appear like a long breath let out, leaping across the lawn, flapping their thin arms past the shag-bloomed maple and the stir of rhododendron, all we can do is nod at the bright transformation:           These two, so recently my daughters, returning to the mother-cry of flight, their shoulders hunched and twitching as the heron hops back into the sky and the grass lifts and lifts them into another ordinary day.