The Flyway

Before the first cold, something tightens in the chest— not fear but instruction, older than the name for it, a map drawn in the body's oldest ink.

They rise from the cattails in a single thought, a thousand wings becoming one dark current that pools and stretches toward the south.

No landmark they can name guides them through the dark. They steer by stars, by field lines no eye can see, by some fidelity to origin that outlasts knowing.

What they carry: the weight of what they leave behind, the summer's last mosquito, the echo of the marsh, a hunger that is also a kind of coming home.

When they arrive, the water looks the same as any water. But they fold into it as if the surface knew them— as if returning were a form of being made.