In Which I Try to Become a Swift
There are two classes of words commonly applied to swifts: words about ethereality, and violent words. They are not contradictory. The violence makes the ethereal accessible. Swifts lay open the sky so that we can go there. They slash the veil.
If the swifts didn’t come, we’d be stuck with what we’ve got.
They were very late this year. Panic rose. I’d get up very early, thinking that I’d heard a scream, and rush to the window. There was nothing there but pigeons as ponderous as I am: pigeons who sleep in trees and waddle in the dirt.
And then, as I was lying on my back, they were suddenly there.
“Why are you crying, Daddy?” said Rachel, who was watching my face instead of the sky.
“Because it’s all right,” I said. “Because the world still works.”
“Okay,” she said.
They’re always suddenly there or suddenly not there.
The air crawls. Up there, like plankton, there are live things drifting in the wind; aphids, other bugs, spiders, beetles. An aphid might be sucked from a grass stem in an English wood, up a gurgling plughole in the air, across the Pyrenees and the Strait of Gibraltar, and into the crop of a zitting cisticola at an oasis in Mauritania.
I’ve tried to map the vortices. It’s best done from quite tall, bald trees with lots of footholds on which you can stand at many heights. It’s a happy, mesmeric way to pass the day.
Airborne thistledown’s the best marker of the vortices. It probably doesn’t weigh much more than an aphid. Near the ground the thistledown is tentative. It moves from side to side, as if testing the worth of all the possible air channels. By four feet up it has decided where to go, though a fleck of down that started in the same flower head might well have chosen differently.
In a wood, or
