Emergence, longing, a grass bow

The church of the redwing blackbird. Those first signs of spring, suddenly there, singing from vertical perches at the ends of dried cattail reeds. Some robins never go south, now, hovering at the ends of open water where the warm creek flows into the iced-over lake. Once I startled a tree full of robins in a blizzard in January, by that lake-meeting point. Suddenly brown leaves stuck to winter branches exploded into a cloud of whirring. When the redwings are suddenly back, singing, that's the first true sign of spring. Everything else was presumptuous. Now the greening emerges from the dark, cramped soil under the dead oaks by the river. Now the dessicants revive. Now every psruce awake with cardinals, becomes shelter for signs. Last year's nests revealed at the top of the crabapple, before the tree leafs out, before its tenants return. I look at the scattered remnants of an old life underfoot, gathering memories and music like fuel for a bright, cool fire. The world seems so fragile, and I wander through it, not daring to touch. What's been broken might be mended now, but will it break again, and how. You hold back from daring to hope, from collapsing into assumptions, even easterly assumptions, not quite able to believe in resurrection. You bend your shoulders to miss the ice-crystal branches, afraid to break their brittle edges. You must go forward nonetheless. And the church of the black-eyed waterbirds, singing cousins of crows, takes light behind trees filled with tapestries of thread and age. I don't want to thorn the roses anymore. I want that echo between tense shoulderblades to escape, buddha-like escape, to shape wind, billow spears of light, break the molds that cling to treeshadows and lichen themselves to the slow air of granite forks under sun dreaming amber pink dry feldspar snows. And fly home, bright-shouldered birds with scars of ancestry on their wingtip shoulders, like mine blooming with aspiration. And dare to trust.



Redwing Blackbirds