I reach through the gap with a long pole and push them back out to the darkness, before they can rise up and speak in their watery melodious dark voices.
There is a city of them here. Some nights it is all I can do to push them back out again, launching them gently with my weary arms.
When the birds begin to stir, I know they will no longer come, and I hold the rail all the way up the steps, and the revolving world whirls me like a crack-the-whip til I grasp the door and fall to sleep staring at Obie’s innocent, closed eyes, my self still spinning.