Sparrow by Norman McCague. He's no artist. His taste in clothes leads towards the dodie in second hand, and his nest. That blackbird, writing pretty scrolls on the air with the gold nib of his beak, would call it Aslam. To stock solitary on lawns, to sing solitary and midnight trees, to glide solitary over grey atlantics, not for him. He'd rather a punch up in a gutter. He carries what learning he has lightly. It is, frankly, based on the usefulness whose result is survival. A proletarian bird, no scholar. But when the winter soft shoes in, and these other birds, ballet dancers, pedants, architects, die in the snow and freeze to branches, watch him happily flying on the all levels and e-levels of the air.