grace notes:  music notation used to denote several

kinds of musical  ornaments, occurring as notes of

short duration before the sounding of the relatively

longer-lasting note which immediately follows them

    The Oxford Dictionary Of Musical Terms

Dawn, or nearly so, the usual cardinals and one

Red-winged blackbird calling and contending in

The pines for an hour already, and among them

To the crabapple tree in its second year of dying,

This year bereft of flowers, leaves already brown

And falling, more brittle branches beneath than

On it, a tree the birds avoid even now knowing

The next summer storm or surely next winter's

Ice will come to claim it, comes this yellow finch

Barely bigger than a butterfly, and settles there,

And suddenly, almost impossibly, the tree breaks

Into song.

The whole poem depends on that penultimate line break

and there is a back story of sorts, realizing when I came

to the end of mine that I had him in the back of my mind -

a little more than fifty years ago James Wright abandoned

his rhymed and metrical poems for free verse (and was

severely criticized for it) and he ended a poem called "A Blessing"

as I did mine.  His poet friends were astounded, it was as though

he had broken the final link between who he had been and who

he was then.  Now of course there's nothing astonishing about it,

though I hope still a bit of surprise.