1.
into flight, the name as velocity,
a swift is one of two or three hundred
swirling over the post office smokestack.
First they rise come dusk to the high sky,
flying from the ivy walls of the bank
a few at a time, up from graveyard oaks
and back yards, then more, tightening to orbit
in a block-wide whirl above the village.

2.
Now they are a flock. Now we’re holding hands.
We’re talking in whispers to our kind, who
stroll in couples from the ice cream shop
or bike here in small groups to see the birds.
A voice in awe turns inward; as looking
down into a canyon, the self grows small.
The smaller swifts are larger for their singing,
the spatter and high cheeep, the shrill of it.

3.
And their quick bat-like alternating wings.
And the soft pewter sky sets off the black
checkmark bodies of the birds as they skitter
like water toward a drain. Now one veers,
dives, as if wing-shot or worse out of the sky
over the maw of the chimney. Flailing—
but then pulling out, as another dips
and the flock reverses its circling.

4.
They seem like leaves spinning in a storm,
blown wild around us, and we are their witness.
Witness the way they finish. The first one
simply drops into the flue. Then four,
five, in as many seconds, pulling out of
the swirl, sweep down. So swiftly, we’re alone.
The sky is clear of everything but night.
We are standing, at a loss, within it.

David Baker’s autumnal “Swift” recounts a community’s gathering to witness a primal and instinctual motion of the other, of the animal world, a flock of homing swifts in ecstatic murmuration. The poem evokes and conjures them first as singular, as bird, as word, allowing the eponymous title to enjamb with the first line of the poem: “Swift // into flight, the name as velocity.” And as the birds exponentially, almost magically, unfathomably multiply (“a swift is one of two or three hundred / swirling over the post office smokestack . . . // flying from the ivy walls of the bank / a few at a time, up from graveyard oaks / and back yards, then more, tightening to orbit / in a block-wide whirl above the village”), the townspeople themselves form a flock, clustering below, “holding hands” and “talking in whispers to our kind.”

“Swift” embodies what Baker himself, in Radiant Lyre: Essays on Lyric Poetry, has said so eloquently of the lyric poem and the “problem of people”—how the privacy of the lyric’s intense, transient, “swift” interiority is also “a vital feature of cultural identity, even perhaps of collective survival.” In shared ecstasy, the self rediscovers itself as both part and whole : “A voice in awe turns inward; as looking / down into a canyon, the self grows small,” and then the birds, our words, our selves transform: “leaves spinning in a storm, / blown wild around us, and we are their witness.”
In Varieties of Religious Experience, William James says that for an experience to be visionary or ecstatic it must be passive (that is, it must happen to us—it cannot be induced); it must, perforce, be transient, fleet, swift; it must be noetic (that is, it must inspire a sense of new or profound knowing); and it must be ineffable, beyond the reach of words. “Swift” is both a description and embodiment of ecstatic experience. By richly figuring the word “swift” itself (as bird, as velocity, as metonymic stand-in for Time, Connection, Love, Life, Mortality), Baker manages to articulate an ineffable truth about beauty, the sublime, and the way the self forms in the wake of an unlooked for and newly recognized desire. “We are their witness,” the poet tells us before the poem shifts into the imperative:

Witness the way they finish. The first one
Simply drops into the flue. Then four,

Five, in as many seconds, pulling out of
The swirl, sweep down. So swiftly, we’re alone.
The sky is clear of everything but night.
We are standing, at a loss, within it.

In this way, the reader, too, becomes privy to and part of the lyric poem’s predicament, its “we” moment of deep and essential privacy.