I wrote a little something about starlings. I started this last fall, shortly after we watched a starling die, and then had a little encounter with one this weekend that made me want to write more. I'm not sure if it's finished, or what it's really about, but I have a few little vignettes and maybe they will become something bigger.
A starling peers over the edge of the gutter, looking straight down at my face through the window, his head cocked and considering. I find my neck at an angle too, gazing up at him through the streaked glass of the window, watching his sharp twitches and speckled neck and long, thin beak until he hops backward, into the wet pile of leaves on my roof and joins two friends. They launch, swooping suddenly up and over my watching eyes to the power lines across the street. Three black parallel lines sag slightly against the grey-blue Saturday morning sky and three starlings wait there, one on each cable, feet grasping the metal in silhouette. The pale yellow sun of late autumn is still below the tree line, but lightens the sky to the shining of sun on water, backlighting the birds on the wire.
It’s early autumn and I am new to Iowa, but not to starlings. They live scattered across these United States—I have seen them in every time zone. I know of the animosity that even bird-lovers hold for these large, simple birds. I know they’ve edged out native species across the country. I know they were brought over from Europe centuries ago, for a nobleman who wanted to populate the new world with all of the birds referenced in Shakespeare’s scripts. A testament to the transformative power of literature. I know Shakespeare has inadvertently changed the dynamics of bird population and migration in this new world. I watch the starlings chirp and squawk at each other. Some people even go so far as to intentionally starve starlings—their goal is to protect the native birds, so they set out food for those species, and pull it back indoors when the starlings show up to scavenge. It seems unfair to blame these three starlings for the disruption. It seems cruel to starve them. But I also know that nature is often cruel and would let all the natives die out. Starlings are stronger, and therefore more fit to survive.
*
Last week, I watched a starling die. We found one sitting on the floor of the magazine office, its brown flecked wings tucked beneath its body against the cement floor, just sitting and waiting. Rachel took it into her cupped palms without a fight, and sat on the yellow sofa, stroking it and speaking in a low mother’s voice, trying to coax energy back into its tired body. We had no idea how it got inside.
The starling had one last fight in it, and leapt, falling out of Rachel’s hands, fluttering sideways and scared beneath an old ottoman. She got down on her knees and bent, fingers crawling tentatively under the furniture and cradled him softly out again. He needed food and water and hope, so we took him outside and kneeled in the wet bark mulch and tried to feed it bits of white bread crust from Rachel’s roast beef sandwich but he wouldn’t take it. Instead, he tried again to fly. We were suddenly elated, his weary wings beating like a pulse three times and then he lay on the ground with us. Oh no, we all sighed, knowing. We knew he didn’t have much time left, we knew as he arched his back, showing us his smooth white belly feathers, flecked with mud from the plot of garden outside our office building, we knew a life was about to leave.
*
Nearly a year later, I stand outside in the rain, waterproof hood pulled up over my hair, huddled under the slight overhang of my front door. I wanted to watch the downpour up close, to see the April rain beat the pavement into puddles. When I scuffed a sneaker against the cement stoop, a starling suddenly appeared from above and behind my head, flapping wildly up and away, to a tree just across the small lawn, near the sidewalk. I looked up at the corner of my gutter and saw the small hole stuffed with mud, loose twigs poking out the entrance. I think it was a she-starling, but I don’t know, saw only a grey-black shadow of a bird scuttle out of the nest it was building, startled by my presence.
The starling danced with my for the next ten minutes, as I waited out the storm outside my front door. She would swoop in for a landing, wings beating backwards ceaselessly to slow her descent as she scuttled back into her nest-box. She’d stay for a few minutes, and I stared at her small opening, hoping for a glimpse of a furrowed wing, nestled in against the rain. Then I would move too suddenly, clear my throat, shift the weight to my other leg, and she’d flutter out to the tree. Once she dove down toward the nest but lost her nerve at the last minute, hovering above my head and then retreating again. Or perhaps she was warning me, flying at me like a predator, pseudo-attack in hope of my retreat. After another ten minutes in the tree, she began squawking at me, angry staccato calls like get away get away. I should know, but I don’t, whether or not she’s laid eggs. Is this a mother’s defense of her babies? A standard response to anyone too close to the nest? Am I reacting in a way that surprises her or frustrates her or am I exactly what she expected?
*
When the starling died last September, it took a long last breath. It’s back arched further, stretching into an angle that looked like a question mark, further than I thought possible. At its furthest point, head curved back against its wing feathers, it quivered slightly, as if a chill ran through its hollow spine. I know this sounds too appropriate to be true, too much like a metaphor, but it isn’t. Birds are flying metaphors, full of the hope and potential we land bound mammals can only dream of, but this one wasn’t flying anymore. Its eyes pinched shut like a baby falling asleep against all its best efforts; it quivered, and sighed a giant exhale of its whole life and then relaxed. The tautness of struggle left its body, its feet curled up towards its white, muddy belly, and it was gone.
We had to go back inside for class, Rachel and I. I could see she was upset and I felt tears welling up from way down in my throat. We sat through workshop and put what was left of Rachel’s sandwich back in the refrigerator and didn’t talk about it for the rest of the day. When I told Kevin about it later that night, I started to cry and as he held me I thought myself ridiculous for allowing something so mundane as the death of a wild bird that got trapped inside a building for a whole weekend without food to bother me so deeply. But I had never seen a living thing die before, never seen the life actually leave a body or feel the tiny heart actually stop beating and perhaps I had never really know that death happened. But now I knew, and couldn’t escape it, couldn’t move back from the knowledge that when a starling dies it shudders.
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Saturday, April 25, 2009
A start the long project I want to work on this summer (a series of essays springing from the ideas in my "ended up midwestern" essay revolving around issues that were going on in Montana and California when I lived there that I may not have necessarily been a part of). This is the beginning of something about homelessness, or something?
The stench of fish guts has sunk into the wood of the Ventura pier, its wide thick planks sticky and wet with the blood and juices of fish that died there, and of the ocean. Salty Pacific water sprays the pier constantly, embedding sharp crystals and dank, faint rot into the meat of the wood. You become immersed in sea there: the loud caws of circling gulls like buzzards, the spray stinging your porous skin, the hot July sun sizzle into the top of your shiny hair and the stink of fish.
Some fish for fun: white and Chicano families gathered around one or two poles, a red plastic cooler with long necks of juice boxes, a portable stereo hissing a crackling connection from the mainland, sometimes a picnic with Zip locked bologna sandwiches, sliced cheese, and grapes. The fathers wrap their arms around children, guiding the long, thin line down into the sea. They throw fish bodies onto ice or the plastic cutting boards nailed to some of the piers’ benches. They laugh.
Some fish without laughing. These are the men—mostly men, almost always men—you see sitting cross-legged on sidewalks outside the Main St. Ben & Jerry’s or curled, sleeping surrounded by garbage bags beneath the trees in Fir St. Park. Men who walk more slowly than any others you’ve seen, not just because they are laden with all their worldly possessions—flannels tied around their waists, leading scrappy, matted dogs on leashes of rope—but because they have nowhere to be. These men fish off the pier with scrabbled-together equipment, with branches, actual tree branches stripped of foliage, and worms not purchased at the smell tackle stand on Fifth and Laurel, but dug from the ground or gather, after rain, in discarded Chinese take-out containers.
The stench of fish guts has sunk into the wood of the Ventura pier, its wide thick planks sticky and wet with the blood and juices of fish that died there, and of the ocean. Salty Pacific water sprays the pier constantly, embedding sharp crystals and dank, faint rot into the meat of the wood. You become immersed in sea there: the loud caws of circling gulls like buzzards, the spray stinging your porous skin, the hot July sun sizzle into the top of your shiny hair and the stink of fish.
Some fish for fun: white and Chicano families gathered around one or two poles, a red plastic cooler with long necks of juice boxes, a portable stereo hissing a crackling connection from the mainland, sometimes a picnic with Zip locked bologna sandwiches, sliced cheese, and grapes. The fathers wrap their arms around children, guiding the long, thin line down into the sea. They throw fish bodies onto ice or the plastic cutting boards nailed to some of the piers’ benches. They laugh.
Some fish without laughing. These are the men—mostly men, almost always men—you see sitting cross-legged on sidewalks outside the Main St. Ben & Jerry’s or curled, sleeping surrounded by garbage bags beneath the trees in Fir St. Park. Men who walk more slowly than any others you’ve seen, not just because they are laden with all their worldly possessions—flannels tied around their waists, leading scrappy, matted dogs on leashes of rope—but because they have nowhere to be. These men fish off the pier with scrabbled-together equipment, with branches, actual tree branches stripped of foliage, and worms not purchased at the smell tackle stand on Fifth and Laurel, but dug from the ground or gather, after rain, in discarded Chinese take-out containers.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
The first scene from my latest short story for fiction workshop ...
"Northern Forest"
The moon hung full and low, a heavy June weight pulling it down close to the horizon. Mary Beth paused, heaving, and sat back on her heels, feet tucked against the cool, crumbled cemetery dirt. Clumps of soil stuck in her hair but she glance at the yellow moon and bent forward, picking up the small shovel she’d swiped from her father’s garage earlier that evening. She watched the spade dive into and out of the moist earth as if beyond her control, mesmerized by the white tendrils of root that poked like tendons out of the precisely-cut edges of her grandmother’s grave. Moonlight illuminated the thread-like root structure, looking like someone had sewn a hem in the soil, crooked and crossing, four feet below the surface. The shovel clanged hard. Mary Beth jammed her small wrist against the kickback, dropped the shovel and swore, shaking her hand in the cool night air, and then remembered she was in the St. Teresa’s cemetery, standing on the grass grown fourteen years over her grandfather’s grave and halfway in her grandmother’s and quickly performed the sign of the cross. She’d hit the coffin. Mary Beth said a quick prayer under her breath, looking once more to the haunted moon, her chapped pink lips moving silently, then hopped down into the grave.
"Northern Forest"
The moon hung full and low, a heavy June weight pulling it down close to the horizon. Mary Beth paused, heaving, and sat back on her heels, feet tucked against the cool, crumbled cemetery dirt. Clumps of soil stuck in her hair but she glance at the yellow moon and bent forward, picking up the small shovel she’d swiped from her father’s garage earlier that evening. She watched the spade dive into and out of the moist earth as if beyond her control, mesmerized by the white tendrils of root that poked like tendons out of the precisely-cut edges of her grandmother’s grave. Moonlight illuminated the thread-like root structure, looking like someone had sewn a hem in the soil, crooked and crossing, four feet below the surface. The shovel clanged hard. Mary Beth jammed her small wrist against the kickback, dropped the shovel and swore, shaking her hand in the cool night air, and then remembered she was in the St. Teresa’s cemetery, standing on the grass grown fourteen years over her grandfather’s grave and halfway in her grandmother’s and quickly performed the sign of the cross. She’d hit the coffin. Mary Beth said a quick prayer under her breath, looking once more to the haunted moon, her chapped pink lips moving silently, then hopped down into the grave.
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
This one doesn't have a title yet... I actually wrote it as part of a short series of experimental nonfiction last semester, but I am workshopping it as an individual poem this semester. Any title ideas?
I have only one memory of our first move:
Nuns carried the refrigerator into my new house:
The house on 67 Constance Street,
which would become 4 Paige Drive.
My mother says this memory is false was
born is because I was only three. And
it rained on moving day.
And the movers wore black raincoats with
hoods drawn up against the wet March cold.
One move in the first eighteen years:
Nine moves in the next seven.
I still have the same desk
I received for my ninth birthday and a
Ziploc bag of New Hampshire leaves
My mother sent me in the mail.
I have only one memory of our first move:
Nuns carried the refrigerator into my new house:
The house on 67 Constance Street,
which would become 4 Paige Drive.
My mother says this memory is false was
born is because I was only three. And
it rained on moving day.
And the movers wore black raincoats with
hoods drawn up against the wet March cold.
One move in the first eighteen years:
Nine moves in the next seven.
I still have the same desk
I received for my ninth birthday and a
Ziploc bag of New Hampshire leaves
My mother sent me in the mail.
Sunday, April 12, 2009
We've been experimenting with forms in poetry workshop (getting to choose which one we write) and I've become intrigued by the sijo (more info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sijo)
I’m thinking about doing a series of sijo about the many places I’ve lived and think of as homes. The brevity of the form seems to lend itself to isolating a single image, while still allowing me to attempt an incorporation of the larger ideas of nostalgia and loss.
Ithaca Spring (sijo)
In March, the ice of Lake Cayuga begins to crack,
Shattering sounds like thousands of falling crystal bells.
I can still hear the ringing from Central Standard Time.
I’m thinking about doing a series of sijo about the many places I’ve lived and think of as homes. The brevity of the form seems to lend itself to isolating a single image, while still allowing me to attempt an incorporation of the larger ideas of nostalgia and loss.
Ithaca Spring (sijo)
In March, the ice of Lake Cayuga begins to crack,
Shattering sounds like thousands of falling crystal bells.
I can still hear the ringing from Central Standard Time.
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Girl
For my sixth birthday my mother gave me a music box:
Pink, lacey, pristine, golden hinges folding back to reveal
Plastic painted ballerina in classical bell tutu, en pointe. I would
Never train en pointe: my prima instructor told my mother
Six-year-old bones are still soft, vulnerable to
Sinking in like clay. I would quit ballet at age ten to
Pursue yoga and modern dance, still years away from
Having the right toes for grace.
After two weeks I snapped the ballerina off and
Watched just the bare, metal spring quiver and rotate
To tinny “Edelweiss”.
For my sixth birthday my mother gave me a music box:
Pink, lacey, pristine, golden hinges folding back to reveal
Plastic painted ballerina in classical bell tutu, en pointe. I would
Never train en pointe: my prima instructor told my mother
Six-year-old bones are still soft, vulnerable to
Sinking in like clay. I would quit ballet at age ten to
Pursue yoga and modern dance, still years away from
Having the right toes for grace.
After two weeks I snapped the ballerina off and
Watched just the bare, metal spring quiver and rotate
To tinny “Edelweiss”.
Thursday, April 09, 2009
Family Tree
I.
Corsini/Squillante:
My Papa had to pay an Irishman
to buy the land for his house.
He and Nona saved for years—
he making shoes while she folded greeting cards
at the factory in Needham.
Now the tiny white house:
wine barrels in the cellar,
rows of tomato vines in the back,
an enormous dining room table.
Papa played the banjo at our only family reunion.
Nona and a league of aunts laced fingers
around my wrists and fed me
giant hand-rolled meatballs off plastic forks.
II.
Corsini/Zimmer:
Gampi’s full name is Oresti Corsini, Jr. but he
Prefers Joe.
Lanky and laughing at the picnic table in
his short-sleeved dress shirts.
Drafter retired from Korea retired from NASA
Won’t discuss Apollo 13 which he helped design.
Towers over his little German wife.
My Nana, bulging at the belly, fierce,
pummels him playfully with tiny fists,
then throws a genuine tantrum over an
empty bottle of Italian dressing once
tore up my mother’s hand-sewn prom dress.
III.
Landrigan/Corsini:
My mother, their only daughter, fits here,
on the New England coast of the Mediterranean,
her dark olive skin carrying
turquoise eye shadow, her wild black curls
pinned down with two combs. She is
barefoot in the kitchen, pumping the hand-crank
pasta machine, birthing new yellow linguine
to dry for tomorrow’s second-day party.
Tomato sauce splattered across the
cream collar of my Laura Ashley dress,
I hide from the boisterous neighbors, from
the cowboy kids play-firing at Indians.
Pale freckled Irish-from-my-father skin
and blonde hair and big glasses and too-thin wrists,
fingers tracing the genealogy chart
Gampi printed on the Commodore 64,
taped across the back of Papa’s house.
I.
Corsini/Squillante:
My Papa had to pay an Irishman
to buy the land for his house.
He and Nona saved for years—
he making shoes while she folded greeting cards
at the factory in Needham.
Now the tiny white house:
wine barrels in the cellar,
rows of tomato vines in the back,
an enormous dining room table.
Papa played the banjo at our only family reunion.
Nona and a league of aunts laced fingers
around my wrists and fed me
giant hand-rolled meatballs off plastic forks.
II.
Corsini/Zimmer:
Gampi’s full name is Oresti Corsini, Jr. but he
Prefers Joe.
Lanky and laughing at the picnic table in
his short-sleeved dress shirts.
Drafter retired from Korea retired from NASA
Won’t discuss Apollo 13 which he helped design.
Towers over his little German wife.
My Nana, bulging at the belly, fierce,
pummels him playfully with tiny fists,
then throws a genuine tantrum over an
empty bottle of Italian dressing once
tore up my mother’s hand-sewn prom dress.
III.
Landrigan/Corsini:
My mother, their only daughter, fits here,
on the New England coast of the Mediterranean,
her dark olive skin carrying
turquoise eye shadow, her wild black curls
pinned down with two combs. She is
barefoot in the kitchen, pumping the hand-crank
pasta machine, birthing new yellow linguine
to dry for tomorrow’s second-day party.
Tomato sauce splattered across the
cream collar of my Laura Ashley dress,
I hide from the boisterous neighbors, from
the cowboy kids play-firing at Indians.
Pale freckled Irish-from-my-father skin
and blonde hair and big glasses and too-thin wrists,
fingers tracing the genealogy chart
Gampi printed on the Commodore 64,
taped across the back of Papa’s house.
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