#1

For the birds who congregate every morning on the wires above a particular alley in my neighborhood.  There are dozens, scores of them, all lined up and screeching in some sort of morning coffee clatch.  And on rare occasion, you can see them all lift off, one at a time but within milliseconds of each other, and swoop in one great burst of clattering feathers through the sky, among the rooftops, and they remind you that life is a series of miracles, that everything is alive and the center of its own universe, bumping up against yours and sometimes, when you’re lucky, crossing one another’s thresholds.