Bird Watching

A friend in the Midwest sent a message recently saying, "The whippoorwills have returned after five years' absence.  I wonder why."  I had to look up whippoorwills in order to respond.  I found that whippoorwills are goatsuckers and in more than one culture they're a death omen, so I wrote back: "Death omen?"  I was at my job, and there was a mountain of e-mails to climb, so I sent off the message just like that: whippoorwills = death omen.  He responded saying he didn't take it that way; he was happy they'd come back, though he didn't know why they left, nor why they returned.  He said, "Hope springs eternal."

I haven't a clue if the whippoorwill has ever been to Brooklyn, nor if it's back.  I know so little about birds, other than the fact that I'm tired of seeing little silhouettes of them on tote bags.

For several mornings now I've been watching a couple of birds that I learned are American Starlings.  They collect dry grass from a swatch of earth surrounded by four brick walls behind my building.  It isn't a backyard really, but it does attract birds not only because there's signs of green life there, but also because there exist defunct clotheslines and robust knots of cable wire that lunge between buildings.

I don't know if I'm watching the same starlings every day, for as I've said I don't have an eye for birds.  What I see is their carrying strands of golden flint that droop from their beaks at a horizontal; I watch their jerky motions, how one seems to be a more fastidious worker than the other.  They're black mostly, and not small.  They flutter straight upwards from the ground as if eyelids batting, a vertical ascent that looks tiresome and awkward.  They stop to rest upon the dangling clumps of wire, swinging to and fro for a minute or two, or they flap to the fire escape right in front of my window to perch for a moment upon the black glossy metal that's been painted so many times it looks itself to be dripping.

Sometimes the grass strands fall from the birds' beaks but they don't seem to notice.  I just stand there with my cup of coffee, avoiding my early morning work of building scenes.  It's as if we're all there taking a break, enjoying the view.  And the starlings continue on with their work in the general direction of the building next to mine, to the cement rooftop there.  They fly out of sight to build a nest that I am unable to see, and then they come back empty-beaked, ready to keep building.  I am quick to believe in death omens, but here in Brooklyn as the sun barely makes its way above to shine once again upon concrete, the universe is reminding me that yes, of course, hope does spring eternal.

On and On We Walked

"On and On We Walked" -- Page 1

The Sketchbook Project Limited Edition Vol. 1

Storytelling

Half of your stories are unfinished or yet-to-be-determined

like that last one about the oldest longest-running friend.

You get distracted by the seed of something, its potential

to get grown, you get stuck on loss and longing, you hit

"publish post" faster than you should. Still, you were not

trying to make a metaphor of your lost friend, but you

have to admit that's the way it turned out, that if

someone read it that way and thought the story was really

just a metaphor about his experiences, perhaps even

his experiences with you, he wouldn't necessarily be wrong.

Small circles. These rings need stretching. You keep thinking

the word "new" only words fall short. Suddenly pigeons

are in symphonic coo, the heat's hissing is made into song

because heat must pass through such a small valve.

I want to tell you that most of the stories we tell are stories

we tell ourselves. Good or bad. Helpful or hurtful. You must

remember your mother differently, perhaps not even

as she was. You must be okay with reheating dinner.

We keep walking through our lives. On and on

we walk.

I was lost in Paris, once, in 2000. I was too ill to be traveling, but my oldest longest running friend, which is another way of saying a woman whom I've been friends with since I was 12 years old, had won a trip to Paris through her job, the kind of job that gives perks like a trip to Paris for working very hard, for "hitting numbers", in which case "won" is not the appropriate verb but "earned" instead. We became friends in 1984. I was made unpopular that year by a girl who had been my oldest longest running friend up to that point.

I was very lucky to be my friend's +1. Not only was my flight paid for, but so was my every whim for one weekend in Paris. It was wintertime. My friend wore a faux fur coat on that trip. The collar came up, making her look classic and sexy in a Weimar kind of way, although the collar was also made of long strands of fake fur, strands that were fuzzy and wild, strands that often got stuck in her lipstick. When this happened she spoke in a lisped German accent, letting the strands stay stuck, and we giggled.

One day we got lost. I can't remember now if we had a map. I don't think we did. She relied on me to speak French so we could find our way in Paris. In fact, I had started to learn French the year we met, that year I was 12 and she'd befriended me partially out of pity.

This year I sent a Christmas card to my friend, to the address she's been living at for more than ten years. The card came back to me marked ADDRESS UNKNOWN. It came back in January, at around the same time another friendship of mine was bombing, at the same time my relationship couldn't keep its grip. I tried to call my friend after her Christmas card came back, but the number I had was no good. I sent her an e-mail after that, but it went unreplied.

Once, when we were 16 or 17, we'd been out on a typical weekend night -- maybe a football game, maybe a party on a parcel of land where kids smoked pot from a four-foot bong. I was with some other kids in the backseat of a station wagon. We'd just dropped my friend off at her house, and when the car pulled away, I saw my friend crying under her porch light. I was the only one who saw.

I'm trying to remember now how we found our way back to our hotel, that weekend in Paris. There was the panic that sets in as night descends. No, I don't believe we did have a map. The words wouldn't come out of my mouth right, and the panic had made it impossible for us to remember that in France some people actually speak English. How did we back away from panic's ledge?

I still have the returned Christmas card on my desk now. And I am trying now to articulate the pain of the returned card, our separation made manifest, just like I am trying to articulate the pain I felt when I saw my friend crying under the porch light. It is something like trying to articulate a child's cry, the sound a whale makes, a howl. The very word "lost" might work, but only if you, like me, hear a ripping sound in your mind's music as you sound out that final "t" following the "oss" sound. [Lost.]

We kept walking, that's what we did. In Paris we just kept walking through Paris. We remembered we were in Paris, after all. It didn't matter if night fell. When night fell, yellow streetlights came on, I remember them being yellow. When night fell, the metro stations' bulbs lit up, looking prettier than they do in postcards.

There is a difference between loss and lost -- living through it vs. having experienced it -- that ever important ripping -- the final "t".

This is not to say that I am content to have lost my friend. But perhaps it's possible that my life is made more articulate, put into relief somehow, now that my friend is lost to me. I don't know. No, I am not content to think of my friend crying under the porch light. The image of her there will occasionally enter my mind for as long as I have a memory, and the image will forever remind me that I failed to see what was happening in my friend's heart, that I failed at being her friend. But I must accept this image of her crying beneath the porch light, for I cannot stop memory any more than I can stop children from crying, wolves from howling, or the numb density of a whale's sound.

Interior Winter

Scavengers have been out in the night. They leave only an outline of themselves -- a colander, a curtain. Look closely and you can see where they trod, to what lengths they sought sustenance in this cold.

To say my interior winter is cold is to say a lion is fierce. How do we measure our interior seasons? Not with blunt tools that call cold cold. Face-numbing, organ-gripping howl, ice so thick it's no longer clear. Most of us survive winter by waiting her out, knowing that spring will come.

The last time I experienced winter -- and by "experienced" I mean I did not just travel through it by going from A to B as quickly as I could -- I woke to the splendor of each morning, blinded by Our Grand Dame's making. I don't know who "our" is when I'm talking about Our Grand Dame, only that she is not my interior winter alone, no matter how personal winter can feel. I lived that winter in a barn on the edge of the earth. Each morning I had to shield my eyes. Spring was not a hoped-for, foregone conclusion; the word "loam" was nowhere in my vocabulary. It was only Our Grand Dame and me, her sun and her moon casting oblong shadows on snow. She held me in the cup of her knotted hand, talking of tasks and barriers. She was trying to tell me that to live fully is to forgive our scavengers their nature.

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Jennifer Love Hewitt's tits are spilling over (again)

: desire

black umbrellas are open wide

tourists are carrying their Macy's bags

I am remembering Nantucket

A man is stopped to look into a window

where there is a clothed mannequin man seated

watching a naked mannequin woman

her dress pooled around her fine plastic ankles

It's an ad about an ad man

looking in at a plastic couple

: desire

In Nantucket, ice clung to sea like a dry lip stuck to

Fran Drescher is Happily Divorced

: hope

In Nantucket, we were the most grown we'd ever been

we didn't fight

not once

They said...you didn't finish high school, you're not going ANYWHERE

: fear

Still, in Nantucket we learned to make coffee from a single cup brewing system

individual plastic containers (what waste)

I said...I'm going to finish college, I'm going SOMEWHERE

: hope

In Nantucket, we learned

Don't let impotence ruin your sex life

: hope

Improve bad credit

: hope

The wind in Nantucket shook the whole of the house

Inside was

: desire

You wouldn't go to the top of that house (for the wind)

even though from above one could see the whole of the sea

It's ok

From below I know

in Nantucket

you tended our fire

: hope

Out back you were nothing but a dark corner of yard beneath a 90-degree angle of stiff bush. Behind the bush was a chain link fence separating our plot from the neighbors' whom I never knew.

You were dark moist cool-to-the-touch packed earth, a dip of ground. Inside the mouth of you were bricks thrown in like teeth, orthodontia Dad had given you.

I remember, more than once, standing inside the old house at the kitchen window, watching the dog dig into your packed hole. The bricks were to keep her in so she couldn't dig deep enough to crawl under chain link.

The dog's nails, ground to the quick for her digging, for her digging, more than once, more than five times, a dozen, a double-dozen, her digging against your teeth ground her nails to the quick, tiny blood marks dotting peach-colored living room pile, points on a map that led nowhere.

Both my sisters lived under ground in that house. Each had carpeted stairs that led to basement windows that had plastic bubble covering. Both put framed pictures and piled-up clothes on their stairs, obstructions that, in the event of fire, could keep them from escaping. Or so I worried.

It's been 26 years now since I stood in the house looking in your direction, longing to be as brave as the dog that has long since died. And yet there are holes like you everywhere in my life, still. Steel wool in crevices, t-shirts in cracks, wood puddings to patch slats.

Last night I ate dinner with a new friend. I told her I'd been living in my apartment for eight years now. I called myself a gorilla in a cage. I meant that somehow over time I've felt my own species leave me. Still I live inside walls, escape hatches plugged with my own psychic obstruction.