A Bird

There’s a songbird trapped in the sunporch. Sitting at the south end of the couch I heard it flap and noticed it buzz by the glass door on the other side of the room. I went to the door to watch it. It’s a good size. It is a marvel. It swoops, dips, and drags in the air of the room, from end to end, casting panicked black turds. It settles on long legs and jerks its long black tail. It lights briefly on the rolled paperback cover of “All the King’s Men,” re-balancing like a man trotting on a rolling log. Every winter since my brother broke the window a few birds come in and shit on top of the bookcases. Soon enough they escape, leaving the hidden turds to dry to chalk in the summer.

It is rapping its hooked black beak on the pane and shrinking back again, wings stroking backward in tight circles. It falls behind the tall bookcase in a fluttering panic and now it’s quiet. It must be standing on the windowsill there, on the other side of Husserl and Hegel.

(I finish the last pages of my library book; it turns out that Miss Vavasour is Rose, which we suspected, and that she and Mrs. Grace had been in a lesbian relationship, which we did not guess. It’s a good enough book, it takes about a hundred pages to really plumb the rich irony in the narrator’s tone, and that alters it. Or maybe I wasn’t paying close attention.)

I don’t know how to put the bird’s color except that it’s grey, shading underneath to tan, with black wings white-barred. It has a sizable sleek form. Is it a mockingbird? It seems fat, too, around the neck, like it’s bulked-up. It doesn’t scream, or even seem very put-off. It can’t find the broken windowpane again, they all seem so alike, opening on the fenced yard under light snow. Does it remember why it’s in here. It knows it has to leave, like the Venerable Bede’s swallow on its passage through the cathedral.

The other day passing Lakeview Cemetery I was prompted to write out some doggerel:

“How unlike the birds that fly

Are we that go by ground

They sport and gambol in the sky

While we just walk around.”

On the couch the sprawled pug whimpers from his dream. I hear the bird scrabble and bang. I’m moved to guide it out, but this would cause more confusion probably and set the bird back. Whenever God closes a door, he opens a window. Can it hone on the noise of the icy rain? It has to perch in there a while, take a deep breath in its bird chest, and approach the problem systematically.

The white on the bird is the mark of contrast that gives it beauty.

Over and over it comes so close, it must have a clue, seems to be purposefully avoiding the missing pane. The shit on my books is smeared from multiple landings.

This piece of writing has the outward aspect of an essay drawing metaphysical lessons from rote behavior of animals. But it’s just a bird trapped part of the morning in my sunporch.

When it approaches the exit I open the door to the room and step inside to wall it off. Stand still watching it. It can cling on the thin (strut thing, molding?) of the window like a woodpecker against a trunk. It leaves momentarily. (Was it really trapped?) After a few false passes it shoots right out the broken window and through a pine tree in the neighbor’s yard, I lose sight. On a red cloth hardcover, its puddled-out shit, its piss-shit, is wet-black and viscous like the ink from a broken ballpoint pen. A pair of tiny clean seeds stand out invincibly, like little perfect popcorn kernels.