Birding by Heart (first installments)

The Unknown Bird

There is the dried-out, ant-ridden husk of some kind of bird lying on the trail when I start my walk. I shudder, but kick it over, trying to figure out the species, and I think, well it can't be a sparrow. Because God says, yes, they, even them, too, and if them, then that much more, you.
This is the invisible, the half-bird, the body-less bird. The sub-bird. The bird that is a bird no matter what you call it, that is every bird and no bird at the same time. Every bird that is a robin, or a finch, or a grosbeak, dies. I know this all too well, and I'm a long way from Sunday school. You'd have thought I'd given up on categorizing things.
But.
The habit of naming is a hard one to break. This experience, of standing here with the ache creeping into my legs, late one spring evening, with the sky growing light purple like a bruise and the Spotted Towhees in the trees calling back and forth to one another across the trail with their sputtering call, this is something I just can't let go of. The ants are streaming in and out, each one of them probably carrying another tiny little piece of the bird's liver, or lungs, or kidneys, and I am standing here looking down not really wanting to put a stop to it as much as wanting to understand it, know it for what it is.
I don’t want to die someday. But I want to stop the endless piling up of days where I die a little bit more each time. I apologize for trying to look this in the face, but in case no one heard me the first time, I am screaming for mercy, wide-eyed and rigid like dying prey -- no, not this, not so soon. I want to learn about death like I learned times tables in school. I wrote them down in my notebook, and took them home and memorized them for a quiz, and then closed my notebook and forgot them. Once in sixth grade a boy in my class told me, quite matter-of-factly, that if you held your wrist in a bucket of ice water for ten minutes, and then cut it in three places in the shape of an upside down triangle, that you'd be dead within an hour. I want to practice death like cursive, and to have no use for it anymore.
Woe is me, I am mortal, both in flesh and spirit.
God warned us about this kind of knowledge. The knowledge of good and evil, maybe that's what the sparrows are protected from. Maybe God granted them the sense not to yearn for it in the first place, and all day long they fly from perch to perch in little trees of life, no one ever remembers about the tree of life, the one that was forsaken, for the longing, the temptation to know. And so what I am suffering here, staring down at the bird, is lingering regret from an ancient let down. The serpent promised me, he said my eyes would be opened, and I would be like God. But he lied. And look what I have been left with. A dead bird and little pink scars on my wrist from a razor. It can't be a sparrow, it just can't be.
But what is it then, is the question I ache with. If God is the one who keeps his word, then what is it? What I really mean is, why me?
This is one of those answers that's in the question.

House Finch

They travel in pairs, and give location calls like this: Yes? Yes. Here? Here. Right? Right. A musical handholding. Let's do this anyway, and despite everything. Let the world spin, indifferently, let millions be born, let millions die, but let's not lose track of each other. Okay?
Okay.


California Towhee

Another one of God's protectorates. A little brown bird with a big loving heart. Magnanimous and unaffected, it governs its very own country from the fence posts along the trail where I take my walks. It looks at me almost concernedly as I pass, as if it knows that I've got something to say. Its call is a single inquisitive note. Tink, it calls. Tink. Tink? Yes, I say. More than you know. It flutters to the ground. Hops disinterestedly this way and that. Kicks up a miniscule cloud of dust with its feet. Tink. Tink? I hesitate as I would when preparing to explain something difficult to a child. But I take too long, and in one, two, three hops the bird has crossed the trail in front of me, and with a low hop-flight made its way to the top of the hill, where I can't see it anymore.
I am tired. That's for sure, even if nothing else is. I'm so tired I could just lie right down here in the dust and die, in the ashes from the fires three years ago and die, my ashes to their ashes, my dust to their dust. The towhees', I mean. It would be the least I could offer in return for the tink. I say the least not because the offer itself is unworthy -- although it is -- but because it is the one thing I want to do most right in this moment, dying I mean, and so my offering it, death, is also unworthy, the action I mean, because there is no element of sacrifice. Except for my body, which I want desperately to be rid of. Yes, I would say. More than you know. Here, go ahead, peck me to dust, peck me to ashes. Really, it's only expediting the inevitable. A controlled burn.
Tink?
Yes, but God has his eye on us, doesn't he? The both of us. And I have made such a mess of looking after you.


Mourning Dove

Two of them this morning, puffing out their necks and sighing their passionate mournful sighs. I feel them like the tips of my fingers, as something belonging to me but distant from my heart, reaching out into silence, or the space outside my skin, tender and swollen with grief. They are me and the thing I'm reaching for at the same time.


American Crow

They are like death: big and black and obviously everywhere, and besides that I try not to think about them too much. Like that one in the middle of the road tugging at the red innards of a smashed rabbit, even in a moment as momentary as that, there it is, insistent on something everyone else willfully ignores. But I'm trying to get to somewhere, and so I'm gripping the wheel and feeling the road spooling out underneath the tires of this death machine, which is really just a cog in the bigger death machine that is the car, and the canyon, and the road and the way it curves, and the last few frightened seconds of the rabbit's life when it made that fevered fateful decision to dart out in front of someone whose wheels were at just the right angle, or maybe whose reaction time was just a second too slow. Whatever the factors, the whole thing was programmed for death, which doesn't faze the crow. It understands the way of things. It sees the value in something that we would even be ashamed of, if it were one of us, we would nail it up in a box and bury it in the ground, while on the surface we would try to forget about it and go back to our long hours inventing things that never die, reprogramming, because we are addicted to life, life, life, to buzzing, whirring, humming, dinging, metallic, endless life. We fill our landfills with things laid out to the sun like the rabbit but unlike the rabbit they never decompose. Time marches by in all its gory indifference and they never lose their composure. So amongst all the clicking and buzzing and glowing we think we are surrounded by activity, by life, and we are, but what we don’t realize is that all this life is ultimately just another kind of death, a death resulted from too much living, sicker and more painful, that is slowly seeping into our skin, till we’re saturated. And we grow tumors and writhe in hospital beds.
The crow picks at the shiny red entrails with her jet black beak. We wear black at funerals and call it proper, but we are really missing the point.
Sometimes I want to be a crow, shrouded in my own blackness and pumping my silent wings up and down against the blue blue sky, indifferent, impervious to life and its deathly sadness. Sometimes it's a dead crow in the middle of the road instead of a rabbit, for emphasis, just in case I didn't get it the first time, about death I mean.


Cliff Swallow

Oh, you little feathered crystallization of hope, your bewildered head turning this way and that, your eyes blinking in the bright light of life. Why are you here, on the concrete in front of the air-conditioning unit? Where do you really belong? And how can I help you get there? I cry a lot these days. It does take a lot out of you. But how paralyzing is desire? Please, can't you just open your wings and fly?
Your bones are blue, like you have a body-wide brain freeze. Boy, do I know how that feels. Like lightning, without the thunder, and meant only for you. Ligaments with exclamation points. I! Am! A! Wrist! Birds have wrists, too. I can see yours, right there were a feather is missing. We have both fallen prey to something way too zealous. Now we are hyperboles of ourselves. I want, very badly, for you to get off the ground, and take me with you.


House Sparrow

An ugly little bird. I wouldn't point it out except that I doubt there are many who would disagree with me. This little bird begs the question: does God still protect us when we're picking through hamburger wrappers, or breathing in the smoke of highways and parking lots, or making our nests in trees in little squares of dirt adrift on seas of concrete? I'm only asking because it feels like a sin, all this development, all this steaming asphalt laid down in long strings across the country, all these white lines painted on them, and all these glittering machines belching out smoke with us at the wheel, gunning toward our destinies. The most ambitious of us have finally reached the West, the Golden, the state of our affairs when we've had them to the point of redundancy, when we've dreamed our dreams so many times over that our minds are saturated with them, and we don't know who we are anymore. Like us, the house sparrows are an invasion from the east. Like us, they are shrewd, ambitious, hardy, and unforgiving of anything that came before them. We are both trying to live out our lives as fast and as big as we can. And so God, what is he but another thing to buy at the strip mall? The house sparrow is an ugly, ugly little bird. It has driven out other species that have eyes for beauty, that do things just for the sake of doing the thing, instead of for the sake of survival. And survival, in California, means profit. I park the car under the tree for shade, and as I get out I hear its chirping restless song. I am here, I am here, I am here. For what, for what, for what? To buy, to buy, to buy. I slam my car door shut and then someone else does, and then someone else does, and then someone else does. We all enter the department store, and I head for the appliances, to buy a toaster. A tag on the cord says WARNING, the power cord on this product contains lead, a chemical known to the State of California to cause cancer, and birth defects or other reproductive harm.
Wash hands after handling.
Does God still protect us when he forsake his protection for our own virility? I think I know the answer, I think I'm aching with it, all over. Like the house sparrows, I have muscled my way into this universe, and now I'm paying the consequences. Me and them, we are tiny powerhouses, relatively speaking, and now we are grinding down to a screeching, painful halt.


Spotted Towhee

This bird makes me feel better when I'm lonely. Not because it cares about me. No, rather because it completely ignores me. I sit down on the path between two of them calling to each other across the trail, and in five minutes they are whizzing past my head as if I were not even there.
The year is half over already. It is my birthday in two days. I will take this moment here, the light of day disappearing, the joyous birds, and the sad silence that their sounds are sunk in -- all of this mourns a loss, and is also a celebration.