I photographed this little visitor in the first week of February last year. A full year has passed since then, a remarkable sequence of months that have been some of the most productive of my life, and the saddest. I suppose the same might be said of any twelve month span, as I tend to measure time by milestones of success and loss. But what if there is another way? What if I should learn to measure time as the distance between meals, as the difference between hunger and a handful of seed?
In my calendar, spring starts on the first day that I open the windows. Winter may return tomorrow, or the next day, or almost certainly the next, but spring started this morning.
I do not consider myself a true birdwatcher, as I seldom venture outdoors with the express purpose of finding birds. I’m more of an opportunistic birdwatcher, always happy when my path leads to a bird, but equally happy to run across a snail or squirrel or vine in bloom.
After acquiring a camera capable of photographing birds (and squirrels and snails and vines in bloom), I quickly accumulated an awkward catch-all folder of “Unknown Bird” photos. This method of cataloguing my photos soon proved impossible to manage. Now, with the help of field guides and online resources, the Unknown Birds folder has dwindled to a minor subset of my bird files.
I’m grateful for the urge to name what I photograph, because I’ve learned about Pied-billed Grebes and Yellow-rumped Warblers, Pine Warblers and Northern Flickers. And I want to keep learning, which perhaps makes me a birdwatcher after all.
Undone
This is the house of chores undone
The kingdom of cluttered intent
Where I toil without progress
Up and down the stairs
Through closets and drawers
Of excess, where we hide
What offends the irritable eye
A scrambled profusion of parts
Unused, whether needed or not
In a bookcase or swing
Still here or long gone
From our domestic castle
Of clenched jaw and glare
The turrets of temper
Piled stone upon stone
Mortared with what we didn’t do
For each other, or ourselves
With what we didn’t discard
In time, simply stored it aside
To stutter free in some later war
All the doors flung open
And cabinets exposed
Spilling the bobbins and bolts
Of our careless disrepair
Underfoot, a bitter shambled state
Of grace, because we stay
To sweep it up again, and say
A house cannot keep us undone
Adaptation
Some days I hardly remember
What it is to fly
What loss is
When morning feels like betrayal
And shoulders ache
With sudden gravity
Pressed into cruel bone design
Too human for wings
As if I never once awoke
Hair smelling of cloud
Wound in wild knots
And damp with tears
Or slept
Curled into a crevice of wind
Other days I recall myself
Grace confined to memory
In which I have never flown
And it was only ever a dream
Of falling
With all the other angels
Rae Spencer 