Three Scenes with Birds

(For Mazie)

Sometimes one day just seems to fade into the next until they can’t be told apart, they become a river bearing its contents swiftly to the sea, all just a single moving, flowing thing, but then on one early evening you are out walking with your dog, you are absently turning over the inconsequential thoughts in mind which begin to dissolve even as soon as they emerge, and maybe it is a warm soft breeze which you barely notice as it quietly slides around you in your state of semi-trance, until you suddenly look up and spot a gathering of Robins perched, silent, in the stripped tree top of a Maple at sunset, and they are glowing golden, impossibly, in the shine of the late day light, and you can’t look away, and even as the sky darkens, you are still standing motionless in place.

Then again, you are sipping on your first coffee while gazing out the window into your front yard when a large flock of pearl-grey doves descends from above on the fruiting Cherry tree and begins feeding greedily on the ripe fruit in a blurry frenzy of motion, the crimson juice smearing their beaks, staining their iridescent feathers red, and then suddenly they rise into the air as one immense being, fly off in a swirl into the vast blue void of a mountain morning sky, leaving not a single cherry behind.

And then there was the time the little Hermit Thrush collided into the front window, and you quickly ran out to see if he had survived, but he was lying on his back, his spindly little legs stuck straight up in the air, and you gently picked him up, you wrapped him in a soft towel to keep him warm, you let your own life flow out into the tiny creature, your love, and you set him down in a box, on a bed of bunched cloth, you waited as his soul flew out into the heavens and learned everything a bird could ever know, and then he returned at last, went straight up to a nearby perch in the tall pine, and there he was joined by a hummingbird, and they sat for a very long time, together, and then he flew away, but now he returns again and again — you named him.