How can I, a woman walking here, so afraid 
of illness, of slow death--of any death, of any illness--
learn what I must learn to endure another night in the cold?
Such thoughts sit in the back of my scalp and look straight out 
through my two brown eyes, through their smooth wall fountains,
into this morning’s halogen light, and here among the tall 
lean and lighted trees, I hear the perfect stillness gently slit 
by the point of a whistle--kik ik ik ik kik ik ik ik--
from a hooked beak high above, from the swish 
of long wings beating through the branch. 
What serenity in a world where everything must die.
An important lesson no doubt and my soul longs for it.
So I look again how calmly the wide-winged 
whistler flaps herself without passion from branch to branch,
into the lean and cold unknown. And suddenly 
I am a woman who flies along from tree to tree 
on her morning walk.