So, I walk.
I try to name each sun-bright thing, memorize crepe myrtle by the National Federation for the Blind building, loose shingles off the Formstone-clad rowhouse three doors’ from mine — off by heart, saved for rainy days — only the starling drift and wren call catch me away. Forget the pit-bull mixes and their coffee-clutching yoga-panted accouterments, Riverside park is two horned larks hopping, tiny devil hooks nearly invisible snags on the wide lawn. Seed-like eyes peeping. Not here, here I am. Forget lemons, oil and wild capers, my assiduously vetted list — the grocery-store parking lot an osprey’s hovering hint of corkscrew, fish in talons. A sidelong moment all pre- or post-plunge above the sedans and SUVs. Nothing to see, move along.
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All along the harbor to Fort McHenry: coot and scoter and bufflehead, cormorant, great blue heron and green too. So much trafficking: waterfowl, shore bird. Dabbler and diver. Long-legged wader. Aerialists voracious at dusk: laughing gull, Caspian tern, flashes in the blooming dark.
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Stand still enough and the mockingbird skims the top of the peach tree, dread in a thousand languages. Nest-stealer, egg pilferer. Racer-stripe above the eye. The nearly whole half-day I watched from behind the kitchen-door window as her two chicks flapped sweaty looking and stunted up my back stairs to stammer at flight on my deck. I imagined the local cat-colony sniffing, assembling. The wing, the prayer. No go. No, go now. Badasses. Live.
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Sitting on that deck like the stubborn bitch of mother’s one-time words for me. Can’t let them go. Let her go. I’m parked for sure, refuse to budge. Make me. Peach tree. Some sky. Black-blue swallowtail in the butterfly bush — at least that’s right. Close my eyes, that’s right. I am in me like packed dirt.
Only the scrabble of what turns out to be a mourning dove alighting the table convinces me to look again. Bird-head cocked, bobbing. Mine too, as if also compensating for a lack of binocular vision. You bet I’ll play, raise the staring-contest stakes. Reptile. I know what you eat. Despite your avian disguise — from this close I detect: grey nape feathers lavendered, tainted with verdigris — I refuse your clucks. Refuse to believe that you, like the snake at Cassandra’s ear in Greek mythology, can get me to understand such language. Thanks but no thanks your eye ring: powderiest, most frangible unbounded blue — no matter to me, I disbelieve, no matter your ability to perceive more shades than mere humans.
When the bird ticks closer, I’m in: twin-lakes blue, dark-night centers.
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I lie, it’s what I do. Fiction, right? I write and sometimes get up on my hind legs and yap my fool head off, quite the trip.
On the drive back I can report the gas station closed for repairs. The mountains filled with fog. This snow, this wind. Too dangerous to stop. Marsh hawk or red-tail on something like every seventh fence-post. Shocks of arrow-shapes swarming above the interstates. Migrations indefinable, unidentifiable, indescribable — I don’t know what! just all the way in. Together, apart. So fast. From one world to another I want to say swift, oh starling. There be vultures in the low valley. Mad cawing.
But I’m still in my old beater and the transmission’s still holding, so for now I’m getting closer, back to you B-more house finch and slate-colored junco, chipping sparrow who clings to the window screen beside my desk like some bearer of ancient folk wisdom. Miss you! mother dead from heart disease, dog from bone cancer, friend gunned down post-choir-practice in front of his house, this friend a scientist who once fashioned tiny helmets to test hearing in song-birds, la-la. I’m here without you. I’m not here with you. Above an overpass another flock un-scrolls. Raise you!
So I am of seven thousand minds tracking the bird-sky’s notation, choric sprawl and spiral, as if they might be words, all I have, all I only sometimes have. Devices clumsy, unyielding, what are the words? Out of myself. Out of mind. The birds eddy and slip. If I could call them back I would. If I could call. Say something. Try.
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