arrives the second week of may, sometimes the third. you will not see one at rest — they roost inside the unused flues of the old part of town and emerge before light, climbing in spirals above the rooftops. by dusk they are everywhere over the tower and gone again before the streetlamps catch on.
plumage a sooty brown that reads as black against the sky; scimitar wings; no perceptible neck. the call is high and dry — a brief stuttered chittering, like a stick run along a railing. on warm evenings the flocks knit themselves into a low cyclone above the chimney of the disused bakery.
they sleep on the wing. they feed on the wing. they mate on the wing. only the nest is still — a half-cup of twigs glued to soot, somewhere down inside the brick. they leave in the first week of september. the chimneys keep them, faintly, in the way the chimneys keep echoes.
— counted forty-one above the square. ran out of light. — t., the upper window.