or, a walker spots mute swans in a park’s flooded field They’re all about bobbing for a meal, these birds, adapting to ruin, their grass newly underwater. Theirs are beaks-at-supper: bills plunging—so they all look headless. Necky divers in a slough: reverse planters, nibblers of contingency, swamped creatures, impossibly pretty. Wings shut, their backs are like sheets of scalloped hair combs, tiered and round; like grey cookies plucked from a tin. They eat, oddly. Nothing halts their practice of dunking prayer: this damp amen; this dip of their heads; this plunk and slide of their streamlined bodies. Reverently, they needle worms. Like blades of grass, they stab the ocean that last night’s rain left. Dumb sailors, the swans mindlessly boat on a sad sea, inches deep, when a walker knows how quickly the weather turns; how swiftly life goes under. Still, on spying green guano on a nearby path—that dried promised land—a walker slips a thought upwards. For now, Noah’s dove can quit her task. Today, the world’s been saved by signs of life in a sodden place. For here are the half-sunken birds—not aloft or at home in a pond, but still feeding. What do they want? More seeds, yanked from the wet. What do they search for?—what we all do: dinner, a kind god. A full throat. Webbed feet that pulse and stretch. The wild joy of receiving.