Seeds with Wings

The salt marsh on these drab Spring mornings has the cast and texture of a close-cropped head. Thick. Brushed. Tan wetted to brown and the river parts it like a razor. But the marsh is done with its winter cut and beneath, seed takes root. It is a thing you cannot prove. It is something which you know. You know it by sound. By the odor of the air. By light and the adjective of sky which today is different. You can feel it. The skin has eyes.           

Down the river an osprey comes on a volute of air, spiraling. All his attention is focused below. He hovers ready to plant himself to water but finds no fertile place, nothing to make him grow. He sees me, a brief flash, recognition of a kind words cannot define, and goes. And, with his departure the light changes also to a filtered gold. It is a tentative light and will not last. It does not matter. The feeling that has drawn me is still there and though it is fine to see the osprey he is not what I came for. I know this. I know it is elsewhere. I could not say because I was not sure, of what it is, that I am seeking. But now I am sure: I am looking for Cedar Waxwings.

It is hard to explain where they come from, these knowledges. They sprout. Unfolding leaves and petals that are understood though not identified until fully opened and revealed. One thing they never are is a contentment.

The remains of the day is a fruitless searching. A pair of mallards let me come impossibly close and only then announce their irritation, blasting away in a snap of feathers. Then, crossing the salt meadow to the beach, I see a flock of canvasbacks bobbing a half mile out, their reddish heads black in the distance where they glide in the swell above the middle shallows. The local mergansers, six of a possible seven, dally between the spiles warily while I pass. I had not noticed them, distracted by that small and effable thing planted among the senses as if waiting for water, waiting for sun, sotto voce: Cedar Waxwings.

The light is all but gone. Unfulfilled, this at once geotropic, heliotropic urge shrivels and is discarded. It is all absence now. Sore from hours of walking and of standing still I amble down the rough, water gouged ravine that is our driveway to the usual din of small birds in the evergreens, sparrows no doubt, not really worth remarking and I don’t. Except - that something – some flash some tone some color at the corner of perception makes me raise my eyes to find - Cedar Waxwings!

They flitter among the juniper, burying in the branches, eating the dusted bluepurple berries, touching close, unconcerned, talking to themselves as they dine. I cannot tell which is their leader. He would be the one who in flight, constantly chattering, moves around the edges of the flock keeping them in line, telling them how and why. Then without apparent cue they fly up (he must have given them a sign) and settle in the spruce across the way and they primp and adjust themselves leisurely it seems until some second signal comes, and they are gone.

I cannot remember entering the house. Or wandering to the window. I do remember staring out and how I felt when against an overcast sky twelve returning great blue herons flew by, over water, way out. Where they are going, what seed they will sow when at long last they land even they cannot tell.

Wings and Earth

A bird is a seed with wings

     but the earth does not love her

                    she sprouts only by spreading her leaves

in skies plowed by the wind

                        - Eugen Jebeleanu

From the collection Secret Weapon, translated from the Romanian by Matthew Zapruder and Radu Ioanid and used by permission.

January 17th, 2009 in Summer