Bedraggled end of season into glorious new. I sing praises like mantra, like memorizing lines, through a nagging feeling of endings. Starlings bump into each other in windstorm, attempting murmuration. The motions of the pencil, its insistent up and down when the hand knows what words must be formed. To speak about land is to speak about life, it writes. To withhold land is to withhold life. To steal land is to steal life. To return land is to return life.
Vehicles stuffed up driveways, parked on lawns, scraped-up exteriors, dented doors, bumpers missing, mirrors askew or gone. Prim rows of daffodils and fresh red mulch and what’s for sale soon ceases to be for sale and the pine trunks accrete regardless. Robin sings after flicker, then cardinal, then flicker, like call-and-response, like impossible dialogue, as starlings murmurate to bathe on sopping ground, as protests assemble on campus lawns and schools sic the cops on their students, violently rescinding any right to that ground.
Up each brutal, beautiful morning with the robins in the dark. Northern cities clearing out as fire holds in the scantest, saving cool and wet. Seeing a deer’s head on a wall and trying to imagine the rest of the body. Trying to will it.
For a few brief days, I was home: buds on aspens, the land an ominous tan, wind high and treacherous, winter static in the clothes and the hair and skin reptilian, in April, in short sleeves. Sudden grassfires whipped out of control outside the city, barrelling east, subdivisions here and there on evacuation alert. There’s since been rain and snow. The green, throughout, still insists.
What must be crossed to reach the water. The barricade, the killing thoroughfare. For months I hesitate, thinking I need to have the right words in tow, but finally I just go unprepared to the river, curious about the water level after all this rain. And sure enough, it’s high, the shoreline well underwater and a few trees’ trunks submerged, and the sky’s an impossible neon blue. Here, the pulse slows, and I am new to this once more, this closeness, and the syllables start tumbling out, manic, exhausted, nonsensical, the mind’s soundings, the mind’s ailing and recovering. Maple-flower and astounding willow bark. Deck chairs and cords of wood. Misplaced envy at the existences of others. Grackle comes to assess me. Blue jay comes to holler at me. The slow-fast of the wide river’s managed current, and the whorl at this small inlet, through choruses of human and avian, fuel-injected and avian, land-thieving and avian.
Spring means chainsaws, mowers, new small leaves, light and water reflecting. A cormorant races over that dance of light and water like the guy on the bike who couldn’t handle being bested by me, peddling with all his might to pass me, to be in front again. Laughter. Butterfly. Boat motor. A stick-chasing black lab. My brother calls from the warehouse parking lot. He calls as I’m fantasizing about removing all work from my summer days, finding a place to fit it so I can spend all my time right here. We exchange photos of our views, his so familiar to us both, mine so the opposite. We talk about camping, and breaks, and endings, and green, the blue sky remaining impossible, and as the pulse slows, the thoughts slow, the syllables.
Now I’m writing this for the water. I’m forming these words as thanks.
What must be crossed to reach the water.
That egg! How startling, how beautiful.