Look at the birds, she points, as they swoop
        and chirp over our town where every cornice
                    refers to the past and anything that matters

                    has already happened: seven governors,
        iron ore and the foundries that forged
trans-continental railroads and civil war, wire

for the cables that strung Brooklyn’s bridge
        from its arches and stretched the wings
                    of the Wright brothers’ flying machine,

                    even Amelia Earhart stopped here for lunch,
        once. The swallow’s tails, sleek as Cadillac fins
or boomerang coffee tables, black as pillbox hats

at the wake for a slain head of state. 
        Hear them singing? I ask. We lie on our backs
                    on playground slides next to the brick high school

                    built in ’42, now used for the younger kids.
        The toxic pie of a fall-out shelter sign,
faded, still hangs by the gym door.

They’re having fun! she cries. I know that whatever happens 
        only happens here, now, in this town where a man
                    guarded the big spring for weeks after 9/11,

                    and a HAZMAT team raced to the mall to scrape
        white powder that turned out to be a breath mint,
crushed under someone’s boot. Not that I can keep the sun

from sliding behind Purdue Ridge, and it already has,
        staining the clouds an uncanny orange. 
                    Good job, birds, she sings beside me, Good job.