March First Grackles
The first grackles came back on a Tuesday, which is the day things come back to Wheatland, because Tuesday is the day nobody is watching. They arrived in the cottonwoods behind the grain elevator in a number that was not a flock so much as a committee, and they sat there making the noise they make, which is not music and not noise and not language but something that has decided not to choose.
They came in the afternoon
when the snow
was going gray
at the edges of the road
and the fields
were still white
but no longer white,
the way a sheet
is white
the first night
and on the second night
is only called white
out of courtesy.
The grackles sat in the cottonwoods
and made the committee sound
and the boys on bicycles
stopped by the elevator
and looked up
without speaking,
which is the highest form
of attention
a ten-year-old boy
can pay
to anything.
The cottonwoods did not mind.
The elevator did not mind.
The grackles
were the news
and they knew it
and they were not going to
hurry.
Word went around that evening the way word goes around here, which is to say it did not have to be said. Men at the diner lifted their coffee a little higher. The widow at the feed store said to the first customer the next morning, You heard them? and the customer said, I heard them, and that was the entire discussion of spring that would be had in public for some time.
The coach walked out to the