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23 BLACKBIRD There is no room for dreaming here. Here blackbirds fill the summer with flashing and open wings, spread tails. Above them, planes. Around them, the occasional boater, the tractor in the hay field, cars along the causeway. But they don’t mind. They see past that, focus on what’s theirs, the patches of reedy greenery and all the hours eternal. And in the fall, the blackbirds remain when so many others leave for warmth. Forgoing the miles or the terror, they stay and they talk their way through winter. They’re here in all their feathery selves, and somehow, they survive as it snows and the landscape empties and night brings out its own cold demons from the shallows of the ocean. The blackbirds inhabit winter, but kept hidden in the trees, buffered from the dark shapes in the air, most make it out the other side into spring. ...

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