On the geometry of flight paths

Dear Roya,

This afternoon, three sharp chevrons of snow geese cut south over the copper cornices of Rue Bernard. Their calls were brittle and thin, like thread snapped against teeth. Down on the sidewalk, the clerk at the dépanneur was already stacking heavy plastic sacks of road salt against the brick, bracing for what everyone knows is coming.

I remembered the pastoral migrations through the Zagros foothills—how the brass bells announced the flocks before the red dust even crested the ridge, and how Khanom-joon would murmur that a traveler’s soul hangs from frayed yarn.

Sixteen winters in this city, and I still crane my neck upward when the birds turn, as though one could simply catch the draft and land beside the dry arches of the Khaju bridge by nightfall. But you know as well as I do that migration is never an undoing. The birds never touch down in the same marsh twice; the silt has shifted, or the reeds have burned.

So I come inside, light the flame under the kettle with its bruised cardamom pods, and let the cast-iron radiator tick out the evening.