Perched ornamental like an angel
at the apex of a Christmas tree, the bird’s neck is curved,
slender, the elegant sway of a tangent function.
The set of egrets—the score of them, nested as they are
in the treed twilight—they could pass as a scatterplot,
snowy ellipses on a dark Euclidean plane. I want to discover
a pattern, a sine wave to impose, dogmatic
order to instill upon their random arrangement.
                   There is nothing

      more orderly than the number one,
                                          is there? unity and identity,
like Euler’s identity, numbers under the magical clutch
of an equation. When we mix every beautiful
number, it comes down to only one. When solving
for the irrational, there is no intercessory intercept
to invoke, no X in need of saving. On some days,

      my incantation is serial, primary,
                                        a set of numbers I chant
recursively. It is a sacrament to count,
beadless. Beads being derivative, rosary or Buddhist,
beads in my hand are powder down, finely disintegrating

and clustered. To be celebrant in a wake of buzzards.
Is that heresy? To be one
                            red-collared widowbird, mid-molt.
            In a volery of birds, to be identity
when all around us, the sutra of dichotomy, narrowing
            and scalar, some calculus of imputation, starlings
                           seen as only black.