Pulse   A cloud of starlings undulating, rising in the failing light, boiling with urgent, unknowable purposes — the sky is breathing starlings.                                  Tonight it’s fireworks and the fierce tang of gunpowder — the flash and the bang, the sudden blossom of light, the crackling drizzle of sparks.                                                 This old-fashioned universe — same old wrongs, same old rites, always the one story forever telling itself: the point, the sphere, the eversion of the sphere, the ringing of the bells theorem and all things involute.                                                   We’re nursed on nothing, shot into the cloud of unknowing, spooked by murmurs of go, baby, go.     © Michael Fleming Brattleboro, Vermont October 2014