Where there is no accumulation, laced and soft, come flocks 
of snowies to shrub pine, wetlands and dock.

Is it a wish to speak a season's complete possibility or make 
familiar an inclination to leave? Snowy egrets could be milk or paint 
egrets, trillium or salt egrets. But they descend softly,

long necks and wing fans. Each one a blizzard 
in a nickname. Is it their lurking extinction, their long,

millennial disintegration that turns blue whales to blues 
on biologist tongues? When they call it tracking bluespassing 
sonar over the hemispheres one by one and ticking off 
fewer mammals than a population can trust, do they know

they're speaking double? Whose blues permeate this air, 
whose mammal memory haunts farthest?