December 6 & 7
Hard not to see each passing thing as a lesson these days. The yellow leaves. The sunset shot with violet & whale grey. The way a soft gust through the pond-side reeds can articulate itself in such a plain, sad song. Against this backdrop everything comes rendered already, tailored to a kind of abstract thinking that at this point seems as much a justification as a reality. I teach myself these lessons to fill my time, maybe, while around me, nothing changes. Evening. Morning. Evening.
Today, Willa attacked a russet hen, carrying the struggling dun body across an acre before I could convince her to drop it. I washed the blood off of her legs & snout under the pump, perfunctorily tossed her into the barn & returned to the chicken, its right wing almost severed, blood upon its breast & coming in a trickle from within its beak, strange & slow. Its eye was wide & tremulous, a deep amber. It breathed & breathed, these slow, ponderous breaths that seemed a very reckoning with death. My hands upon it found it warm & I thought to tell it something wordless in that touch—a prayer, a call-note that could heed no response, a simple apology. Its neck in my grasp, then, was brittle-thin, its thin vertebrae palpable as I lifted it & spun it. It took two tries. In between, those eyes thirsty for their closing. In the woods beyond the northern fence we found a suitable spot & buried it.
This morning, hours before, I sat between two lakes in the turn of the dawn. I looked upon a piece of wood protruding from the water that resembled a heron enough to merit a second & third take. A songless bird twittered tiny about its base, diving in quiet ripples for food. I was not sure which I found more striking, the resemblance itself or the one with that fragile red heart within, that porcelain beak poised at the ready. I wondered after it, to my mind at the time a symbol of the critical faculty on the one hand & the creative on the other, of the removed & of the immediate. I had no idea what the day held. We are beyond our own control.
So how can we feel, after all. That bright blood upon the rust-orange beak. The emerald water in the lake hours earlier. These stillborn moments, tableaus even as they unfurl in huffed breath & punctured breast. How am I governed that I see it so? That this beauty, this heart-rending finite grace that lives & dies all around me leaves me ashen & slate-faced & quiet at last? Where some brilliant song in all this slip & tremble?
Immediacy & resemblance. A writing & a doing. Here we dwell in the indeterminate. My gaze flutters between the two, my eye a clipped wing.
***
The image of that wood, shaped & wind-cut over countless years, dipping up from the blue-green lakewater in the perfect shape of a heron appertains now. Such a collision of image—yesterday’s yellow eye, today’s lingering heron almost academic. The bird, the bird carved of felled tree; the song & the silence that follows. More of that to come, I imagine, as it ghosts me still.
& today a fine drizzle or intermittent quiet rain, soft & mute upon the leaves & the grass & the brown pond across the field. What a world we live in here, whittling our hours in this capacious seclusion. We go to Deer Point on the other side of the island entire today to meet with a woman who needs caretakers for her property. A master gardener & an English garden, water-side on eight acres, fulgent & bright & splashing with color, a kind of contained fauvist dream. This could be a boon. How I’ve sat upon the moss & lichen, the fallen bough & bone, & asked for the creaking of some door. Perhaps, today, after all, we’ll hear it & find a footing. We’ve not asked a great deal of the island, & yet its demands upon us seem unremitting thus far. Well well, this bed we’ve made & so on. But I’d lie to tell a sob story—though we’ve weathered a thing or two & seem at present under some cloud, here we are nonetheless, knocking on the red bark of the madrones & asking for some little berth, a black dirt firm underfoot, a sky cloud-dappled & stretching vast for miles, & breath issuing still from our tender pink lungs. It is no small wonder to try & try, no matter how small the dreaming.
Today, Willa attacked a russet hen, carrying the struggling dun body across an acre before I could convince her to drop it. I washed the blood off of her legs & snout under the pump, perfunctorily tossed her into the barn & returned to the chicken, its right wing almost severed, blood upon its breast & coming in a trickle from within its beak, strange & slow. Its eye was wide & tremulous, a deep amber. It breathed & breathed, these slow, ponderous breaths that seemed a very reckoning with death. My hands upon it found it warm & I thought to tell it something wordless in that touch—a prayer, a call-note that could heed no response, a simple apology. Its neck in my grasp, then, was brittle-thin, its thin vertebrae palpable as I lifted it & spun it. It took two tries. In between, those eyes thirsty for their closing. In the woods beyond the northern fence we found a suitable spot & buried it.
This morning, hours before, I sat between two lakes in the turn of the dawn. I looked upon a piece of wood protruding from the water that resembled a heron enough to merit a second & third take. A songless bird twittered tiny about its base, diving in quiet ripples for food. I was not sure which I found more striking, the resemblance itself or the one with that fragile red heart within, that porcelain beak poised at the ready. I wondered after it, to my mind at the time a symbol of the critical faculty on the one hand & the creative on the other, of the removed & of the immediate. I had no idea what the day held. We are beyond our own control.
So how can we feel, after all. That bright blood upon the rust-orange beak. The emerald water in the lake hours earlier. These stillborn moments, tableaus even as they unfurl in huffed breath & punctured breast. How am I governed that I see it so? That this beauty, this heart-rending finite grace that lives & dies all around me leaves me ashen & slate-faced & quiet at last? Where some brilliant song in all this slip & tremble?
Immediacy & resemblance. A writing & a doing. Here we dwell in the indeterminate. My gaze flutters between the two, my eye a clipped wing.
***
The image of that wood, shaped & wind-cut over countless years, dipping up from the blue-green lakewater in the perfect shape of a heron appertains now. Such a collision of image—yesterday’s yellow eye, today’s lingering heron almost academic. The bird, the bird carved of felled tree; the song & the silence that follows. More of that to come, I imagine, as it ghosts me still.
& today a fine drizzle or intermittent quiet rain, soft & mute upon the leaves & the grass & the brown pond across the field. What a world we live in here, whittling our hours in this capacious seclusion. We go to Deer Point on the other side of the island entire today to meet with a woman who needs caretakers for her property. A master gardener & an English garden, water-side on eight acres, fulgent & bright & splashing with color, a kind of contained fauvist dream. This could be a boon. How I’ve sat upon the moss & lichen, the fallen bough & bone, & asked for the creaking of some door. Perhaps, today, after all, we’ll hear it & find a footing. We’ve not asked a great deal of the island, & yet its demands upon us seem unremitting thus far. Well well, this bed we’ve made & so on. But I’d lie to tell a sob story—though we’ve weathered a thing or two & seem at present under some cloud, here we are nonetheless, knocking on the red bark of the madrones & asking for some little berth, a black dirt firm underfoot, a sky cloud-dappled & stretching vast for miles, & breath issuing still from our tender pink lungs. It is no small wonder to try & try, no matter how small the dreaming.
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