Hummingbirds

It helps if you don’t overthink migration,
nor anything else when it comes to moving:
how imperceptibly the angle of the sun
changes in late July in Saanich, on Saltspring Island.

If it were time to go
you’d have the creeping feeling
the meeting is in another room,
an anxious dream, departmental reports,
you without pants, an inappropriate hard-on.
Everyone else is leaving, you’re still in the
break room with half a bad sandwich,
cooling coffee, sugar on your breath,
the tides, you realize, pale as pupae.

There seem to be fewer now, at the feeder.
They still collect, tail-end of August,
Rufous young, fighters, each one a small
persimmon, turned oaks, autumnal fruit,
a tubular pulse.

I read somewhere hummingbirds beat their
wings ninety times a second, faster when
they’re infatuated, their metabolisms
gyroscopes, so blindingly quick we seem
never to move, eerie, plaster-still.
Though /
the meteorologists are weeping millibars,
warm water, the flood’s ransacking
Green Mountain and the gurgling Toe River,
minutes of the summer’s summit drying
the spider legs that were Lake Mead.

They envy our immobility, these traveling
birds, the dedication we have to our craft,
even our trigger fingers fixed, while
around their fragile heads beats
the beautiful ruin of the evening.