Nineteen Species of Sandpipers
— THE SIBLEY GUIDE TO BIRDS
And if you count the sanderling, exactly the number
I saw on the beach at Duck, seven at the water, feeding,
twelve in a line along where the tide had ended, watching.
One of those accidents of timing that greets the very nature
of artifice, the way William Debrae, my great- grandfather,
taught me the art of the kite at the edge of the ocean at
Kitty Hawk or at the edge of a lake that looked to me
like a sea, who had bought his last school-teacher
bicycle from the Wrights in Dayton at the beginning
of the twentieth century, and who was born before our
Civil War and knew survivors of the War for Independence.
Nothing is disconnected, the numbers plotted, cause and effect,
persons, places, things that seem so arbitrary, until you think
about the man standing at the dead end of the pier waving his arms.