When feeling confused,
as if I’ve trusted a broken compass
or started to believe we might be no more
than scraps of molecular machinery,
I remember this:
During the Grand Entry, on the fifth day
when everyone looks weary
and the morning is already hot,
after nearly a hundred dancers have entered
and made their way around the circle,
stepping lightly to the beat of the drum,
a single white feather falls to the rough floor,
little more than a fluff of milkweed,
a puff of cottonwood drifting down.
But when a watcher spots the feather
he rushes to it and places his hat over it
so that not even the still air on this hot day
might blow it away.
He signals to a veteran from one of our wars,
a man qualified to pick up the feather
and return it to the dancer who lost it,
as likely a prospect, it seems, as returning
a missing feather to the right bird in a sky full of birds;
but for those who keep these traditions,
a version of knowing that even the hairs on our head
are numbered, not even one
could be lost without being missed.
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