SPARROW
Who cleared the bird from the stony path, bird I was watching become something else, its wet feathers matting then drying and parting back to skin? In a few more months, the ribs would’ve been a house framed out, barrel staves, then once the spine showed, the keel of a skiff. Already wind was passing through the very body it used to lift.
Such strange reversals the end brings.
The bird was one of my private measures of time bent to its work, paring, reducing, and recomposing—those colonies below digging in and fattening on the body. I was tracking increments, how the bird wore its days. Or days wore a bird. I kept it as evidence of one of the ways the world goes on without me. That the world goes on without me is an old and familiar shiver. Lying in bed on a summer night and hearing the older kids still at their games, would join with a flash of kids in Japan on the far side of the globe, rising and eating their morning soup. I was not moved to slip out to play then, or pinch an arm and confirm myself. I wanted only to be-and-not-be simultaneously, for as long as the displacement lasted.
With the bird gone now, what’s missing is a way to reset the day. I keep checking the path for the cycle ongoing: a being turned toward becoming again. Recently, in that spot, one rock balanced just so on another became a dark breast, feathered with dampness. A tab from a coffee cup was a beak. There was some solace in imagining, but without the body, time’s renegade—it can’t be illustrated by a diminishing wing. Its increments are not en route to anything.
OPEN SPACE
Spots that look bare at first—stretch of back, upper arm—are, if you slow your looking way down, sites of endless microscenes: angles thrown by sudden flexing, shadows cast by turning and bending, folds lit by sweat, outcrops catching wind. Once, the eye could rest on these. Sip from. Take in. Those spots on the body so full of suggestion, that inclined toward or beckoned seem now occupied with Tweety Birds, anchors, names of beloveds. All those images staking claims. A rise of muscle, like a hill once learned by climbing and roaming, is real estate. A place settled and named, with monuments, plaques, and private museums. It’s always been the habit of conquering imaginations to call a place empty, and build there.
For a taste of what used to be, you can visit tallgrass prairie preserves in Kansas and Oklahoma, spaces much like the unmarked body—efforts of conservation, and rare.
Of one form of lost intimacy, Thoreau wrote: “I sometimes left a good fire when I went to take a walk in a winter afternoon; and when I returned, three or four hours afterward, it would still be alive and glowing. My house was not empty though I was gone…. It was I and Fire that lived there.” Then things changed at Walden Pond. “The next winter I used a small cooking-stove … but it did not keep fire as well as the open fireplace. Cooking was then, for the most part, no longer a poetic, but merely a chemic process. It will soon be forgotten, in these days of stoves, that we used to roast potatoes in the ashes, after the Indian fashion. The stove not only took up room … but it concealed the fire, and I felt as if I had lost a companion.”
Such are small reveries improved away.
And what of other losses sustained? At the moment plumbing moved inside, I imagine I’d have felt keenly the absence of wells—the thrice daily (thrice itself gone!) chore of fetching, the load awkward and heavy, but on the way there and back, a quiet all to myself; the scrape of the empty bucket descending; the plunge-and-fill sounds; the crank tense and rope spooling; my face in ripples surfacing; the overfull splashing on legs in summer, so sweet.
What’s the word for an elegy that mourns a thing it never knew?
My tallow candle, its buttery crackle.
My jeweled preserves on a pantry shelf in winter light.
Once that sound, wind-through-trees, was a forest breathing. A body moving through woods understood it. Breathing meant many things: signs of rain or evening coming, early notice of seasons turning, a density of pines giving way to meadow. But now, even if you stand very still—in deep winter, high summer, it hardly matters—what you’re hearing is likely distant traffic, planes above clouds, or generators. Not a deep sigh. Not a thought humming. To think that a forest might breathe now is a fancy—a state “modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will,” as Coleridge said. Whereas it used to take imagination, that “higher form,” the “living power and prime agent of all human perception.” So went the Romantic notion that, by overcoming intellection and knowing the world to be animate, we might regain for brief spots of time all that’s been worn so thoroughly away.
The force that renders land, water, and trees quaint (“charming in an old-fashioned way”) settles in. Settling controls and legislates. To suspect that a thought might be called quaint cinches in imagining. Dams the changeable truths of a stream. Shrivels a phrase like the wings of trees. Quaint won’t let a body see green-in-flight, or suggest the song of budding pears is in any way pinkly audible.
DODO
Once men with their dogs, cats, rats, and pigs overtook the quiet island of Mauritius, the Dodo disappeared. In one 1622 account, a whole flock of Dodos, hearing the squawking of a single bird, rushed to the scene and all were captured, snatched easily by hungry Dutch sailors. With no natural predators, safe and content on their wooded island, Dodos nested on the ground and spent their days eating and sleeping. Though capable of running, there was no need. And their beaks, though hooked and powerful, found no occasion for self-defense. Imagine a flightless, three-foot-tall bird, heavy and round, with a tufty tail and afterthought wings coming easily up to you, tipping its curious, bald head to one side, fixing you in its bright yellow eye. Imagine it eating from your hand, or working beside you plucking crabs at low tide. Or that by watching and tagging along, you’d be led to all the fruit you’d need.
Speculation about the Dodo’s name confirms a very different stance: perhaps derived from the Portuguese doudo or doido meaning “fool” or “crazy.” Or from the Dutch dodoor (sluggard) or dodaars (fat ass). As late as 1766, Linnaeus coined Didus ineptus—“Inept Dodo.” And still, today, Dodo means “addled, laughable, dumb.”
And what might be the Linnaean for one who blames a thing for its own demise?
Once there lived an animal whose proportions were perfect, precisely suited for a quiet life, for roaming grassy spots near shore, gathering abundant fruits, seeds, roots, and nuts; who moved through its simple day in no hurry with no fear at all, in a place acknowledged as paradise. To find a name for such a creature, by which we might recognize others like it, to specialize innocence, classify unguardedness—we lost that chance long ago.