Redbud
Today I woke up, and the earth had decided to be born.
Sitting on the deck, we saw a wheeling white knife, a slash, a flag, of a bird that we thought was a Swan. How I wanted it to be, but it wasn’t that. It was a stork surely, new life in its talons. No, a heron that was great and not blue.
Blue, were the eggs in the nest, by the front door, at the top of the stairs, and I was astounded by them. Five eggs in a nest, impossibly blue (unlike the white heron), and impossibly small. The other nest in the planter at the bottom of the stairs was forsaken.
Somewhere geese were honking. A sound indescribable for its ability to combine that which is deeply annoying with that which is deeply moving. There is no animal so self-assured as the goose, and I have loved him since November in Long Island when we stopped and looked up as a gaggle flew over and we didn’t say anything and still haven’t.
But here it’s swallows overhead, the geese are somewhere else. And the swallows are darting—there’s no other word for it—from the nests they plaster up under our shelter, in the corners of the porch. Their droppings in mountains on the cold black slab, and that’s why you keep threatening do knock them down. Please don’t, I pray to God. I would die a death without the swallows, even when they dive at my head, even and especially when I feel my hair move with their wings. Talk about a knife.
I can’t even sit on the toilet without laying my glutted eyes on a bluejay in the tree outside the window. Blue! Do you understand that? What is blue other than a blueberry? Good God. And my best friend’s eyes. Oh, and of course, the eggs.
Where have there ever been so many birds? Surely never anywhere before.
So I go to the pond, where my own green eyes are reflected when I stare into the water looking for a snapping turtle or a snake and see instead teeming life. Tadpoles that vibrate themselves through the shallows, waiting or trying to become frogs.
I take off my clothes and consider, consider solitude, and snakes and snappers, and losing a toe, and what that would mean. And I don’t count and I fling myself forth and my breath catches like a little death and I force myself not to flee towards the moss-slick ladder out that my feet always slide on in just such a way that it hurts.
The last person in this pond was undoubtably me. It is early April, and the water is possibly colder now than any other time. Colder than December and January too.
The redbud outside your window is in leaf, just barely. Each new shoot is a drop of blood, a bloodied heart, grotesque and glistening, screaming to be touched. To be pulled out of my own mouth like a wet cherry cough drop. And I think of the birds you used to keep in this room, and I open the big window and I reach my hand out to touch that which is crying out to be touched.