This is a picture I did not take

of the sky on a cold and clear afternoon, air suddenly filled with two competing sounds; the low rush of a helicopter scrambling to catch-up with some traffic disaster, and the high, faraway clucking of Sandhill Cranes migrating in the wrong direction at the wrong time of year, each sound pulling me to look up, look up and see four distinct aerial arrangements converging into a pipe of perspective; above me on up: a hawk, forty feet off the ground and swooping right-to-left, and above the hawk the copter, flying left-to-right, each colliding (not in altitude, but in stacked arrangement) and above the helicopter, Cranes in the kind-of misshapen checkmark you'd make if your pencil split, mid-break, and further, as my eyes adjusted, the speck of one single jet decelerating inside its flight-plan to the world's busiest airport, mere miles from this sky's column where all aligned at once as if purposed.