Sketches of November
Nov. 22nd, 2008 05:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
summer_jackelApparently, November was mostly about birds.
It's November, and I can feel myself dying again. I'm starting to forget how many times it's been, but then I've never been fantastic with numbers. I wonder what new thing will rise from my compost heap this time?
*
The stubby, stout little African parrot sits on her perch in my bedroom, fluffing out feathers that run a spectrum of grays, yellows and unlikely electric greens. She quirks her head and looks at me with sideways humor, her orange eye coyly half-lidded. When, with deliberation, she steps onto my hand, her feathers lie back down. They are silky, smoother than any other bird's I've ever touched. As I pet her, she fills her sharp beak with the webbing between my thumb and forefinger, holding on hard enough to stabilize herself. I'm not concerned in this moment that she'll bite me, nor when she holds my entire fingertip in her beak with complete gentleness. A slight increase in pressure tells me she's done; I stop petting her, and she lets me go. When the tip of her hookbill explores my face with the delicate sensitivity of a fingertip, I believe that she understands how I am offering my trust as well.
I look back at this experience and realize: this, in my home and seeking contact with me, is a parrot. An intelligent, wild animal. Is there any way I can possibly be grateful enough, appreciative enough, of the incredible honor and joy and blessing that this is?
*
There was a raven...there are always ravens, but this one was especially striking. Huge and glossy with purple-green highlights, so black against the heavy, wet air that he looked like a tear in a painting. For an instant I could see as if looking at a photo negative, the bird moving like a hole in over-exposed reality. Then he cocked his head the way that most birds do, but slowly, looked at me with that moist and uncannily intelligent gaze. And he rose up in slow circles: blacker than darkness, raven against a white-grey sky.
*
In the morning after a rain, the redwoods are clothed in high fog, and raven calls echo strangely far. The low, hoarse cries seem both muffled and loud, and they carry. Early this month, I heard a single raven calling in wet silence. It has echoed oddly in my mind ever since.
*
There were ravens at Disneyland, too. I didn't realize how much I'd missed them until I spotted a few loitering along the Matterhorn coaster, skewing the perspective of the artificial mountain that serves as its diorama. Watching them flutter against the warm and cheery skies of August-seeming blue, I felt a touch of what I'd been dreading about coming here, that sense of vertigo, of disorientation at being in such a strange and artificial place. The feeling had more humor than horror to it this time. I suppose I am less easily thrown off center now than I was at seventeen. Now, I carry November inside me, its coldness a compass of sorts. These ravens are comforting, but not necessarily a lifeline. Pretty things: I notice them again, even at the top of the coaster with my attention held by much more unusual sensations. There are always ravens.
*
What's love? This sense of freezing-bitter loss, the pit of anguish whose eyes I can't quite bring myself to fully meet yet, and which I am becoming heartily sick of? Or the way the sunlight catches briefly on a strand of your hair and the world collapses itself into a
breathless and giddy moment of beauty, as piercing and pure-tasting as ice water? The moment in which I catch a breath of your scent by accident and, before I check myself, am moved to bliss?
*
I remember your heart beating like a bird in my palms, fast and breathless. But were you a chickadee, a little starling, or something raptorial, like an eagle with three-inch talons and a mad, unforgiving glare? Either way, I welcome you. And perhaps we were both, by turns.
*
The cloud of starlings fell upward, giant black schools of them moving fluidly and in complex patterns around one another in the cold November air. They have a heaviness, a weight, like the running sides of one enormous animal, but they move so quickly, so lightly at the same time. It is an immense choreography, so complicated and smooth.
Then, almost all at once, they resolved into long, clattering lines on the roofs of the transit station. I wonder, as I think people must always have wondered, how on Earth these little birds know how to do it. How do they decide? In their own flight, do they experience
anything like the joy and awe and inspiration that commands me into stillness, to stare up at them in this shabby urban place, breath trapped, enraptured?
*
November calls to me in the thousand soft whisperings of the blazing-yellow maple leaves, the brief blood-red flare with which only one of my several ornamental maples graces the blessed eye. In leaves on the wet ground, still whole as the invisible hands of decomposition reach up to them, in dry mosses gone violently and vividly alive, in waterways that are beginning to swell. November coming. Coming with its cold and isolation and renewal, with the explosive blossoming of fungus and fern. Every morning a new tanoak has fallen, its diseased wood spongy, releasing its identity with a sigh. Telling me, if in the fall and summer you found your dying, it is time now to lie down with gentleness. Lie down in the soft mud and rotting leaves.
Welcome.
It's November, and I can feel myself dying again. I'm starting to forget how many times it's been, but then I've never been fantastic with numbers. I wonder what new thing will rise from my compost heap this time?
*
The stubby, stout little African parrot sits on her perch in my bedroom, fluffing out feathers that run a spectrum of grays, yellows and unlikely electric greens. She quirks her head and looks at me with sideways humor, her orange eye coyly half-lidded. When, with deliberation, she steps onto my hand, her feathers lie back down. They are silky, smoother than any other bird's I've ever touched. As I pet her, she fills her sharp beak with the webbing between my thumb and forefinger, holding on hard enough to stabilize herself. I'm not concerned in this moment that she'll bite me, nor when she holds my entire fingertip in her beak with complete gentleness. A slight increase in pressure tells me she's done; I stop petting her, and she lets me go. When the tip of her hookbill explores my face with the delicate sensitivity of a fingertip, I believe that she understands how I am offering my trust as well.
I look back at this experience and realize: this, in my home and seeking contact with me, is a parrot. An intelligent, wild animal. Is there any way I can possibly be grateful enough, appreciative enough, of the incredible honor and joy and blessing that this is?
*
There was a raven...there are always ravens, but this one was especially striking. Huge and glossy with purple-green highlights, so black against the heavy, wet air that he looked like a tear in a painting. For an instant I could see as if looking at a photo negative, the bird moving like a hole in over-exposed reality. Then he cocked his head the way that most birds do, but slowly, looked at me with that moist and uncannily intelligent gaze. And he rose up in slow circles: blacker than darkness, raven against a white-grey sky.
*
In the morning after a rain, the redwoods are clothed in high fog, and raven calls echo strangely far. The low, hoarse cries seem both muffled and loud, and they carry. Early this month, I heard a single raven calling in wet silence. It has echoed oddly in my mind ever since.
*
There were ravens at Disneyland, too. I didn't realize how much I'd missed them until I spotted a few loitering along the Matterhorn coaster, skewing the perspective of the artificial mountain that serves as its diorama. Watching them flutter against the warm and cheery skies of August-seeming blue, I felt a touch of what I'd been dreading about coming here, that sense of vertigo, of disorientation at being in such a strange and artificial place. The feeling had more humor than horror to it this time. I suppose I am less easily thrown off center now than I was at seventeen. Now, I carry November inside me, its coldness a compass of sorts. These ravens are comforting, but not necessarily a lifeline. Pretty things: I notice them again, even at the top of the coaster with my attention held by much more unusual sensations. There are always ravens.
*
What's love? This sense of freezing-bitter loss, the pit of anguish whose eyes I can't quite bring myself to fully meet yet, and which I am becoming heartily sick of? Or the way the sunlight catches briefly on a strand of your hair and the world collapses itself into a
breathless and giddy moment of beauty, as piercing and pure-tasting as ice water? The moment in which I catch a breath of your scent by accident and, before I check myself, am moved to bliss?
*
I remember your heart beating like a bird in my palms, fast and breathless. But were you a chickadee, a little starling, or something raptorial, like an eagle with three-inch talons and a mad, unforgiving glare? Either way, I welcome you. And perhaps we were both, by turns.
*
The cloud of starlings fell upward, giant black schools of them moving fluidly and in complex patterns around one another in the cold November air. They have a heaviness, a weight, like the running sides of one enormous animal, but they move so quickly, so lightly at the same time. It is an immense choreography, so complicated and smooth.
Then, almost all at once, they resolved into long, clattering lines on the roofs of the transit station. I wonder, as I think people must always have wondered, how on Earth these little birds know how to do it. How do they decide? In their own flight, do they experience
anything like the joy and awe and inspiration that commands me into stillness, to stare up at them in this shabby urban place, breath trapped, enraptured?
*
November calls to me in the thousand soft whisperings of the blazing-yellow maple leaves, the brief blood-red flare with which only one of my several ornamental maples graces the blessed eye. In leaves on the wet ground, still whole as the invisible hands of decomposition reach up to them, in dry mosses gone violently and vividly alive, in waterways that are beginning to swell. November coming. Coming with its cold and isolation and renewal, with the explosive blossoming of fungus and fern. Every morning a new tanoak has fallen, its diseased wood spongy, releasing its identity with a sigh. Telling me, if in the fall and summer you found your dying, it is time now to lie down with gentleness. Lie down in the soft mud and rotting leaves.
Welcome.
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no subject
Date: 2008-11-23 02:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-23 02:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-23 06:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-23 04:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-23 07:39 pm (UTC)I will meet you. One day. ;)
Glad you had fun at the park!
no subject
Date: 2008-11-23 04:53 am (UTC)Are you back from SoCal? Want to hang out? :> Persistent vulture is persistent.
no subject
Date: 2008-11-23 04:37 pm (UTC)Which is just as well, because rain or shine, dogs must walk, and all of mine are weatherproof.
Yay persistent vulture! Tuesday afternoon???
no subject
Date: 2008-11-24 01:38 am (UTC)Keeps making me late for work. Damn fall. :>
Let's see. This week, I'm working until five on Tuesday. Dinner's still an option, if your yen for Chinese (har!) persists. I have Wednesday free, Thursday afternoon (after three) and Friday afternoon (after four), and Saturday free.
Or pick any day the week after, and I'll bite people until they let me have it off. :>