Connection

"Each year is a surprise to us. We find that we had virtually forgotten the note of each bird, and when we hear it again, it is remembered like a dream, reminding us of a previous state of existence. The voice of nature is always encouraging."
                                                  -Thoreau

9am Sunday February 9, 2014

23 degrees

Sitting at my corner. My first conscious capture is the lime on the wood planks: long stacked-like brick planks that hold the earth from falling into the street. The color links up with my memory and I’m associating:

color pop

push pop

ring pop

candy paint

jolly rancher

sour apple

jell-o jigglers

Pretty paint on barriers like paint ball splots on police shields, like tropical murals on condemned Philly row homes. Bright colors holding hands with drabness: winter whites and bland browns plus the mean mood of those cool winter blues.

The petite chimney of my wide apartment building is putting out a faint but steady puff of steam, looking tired, looking like The Little Engine That Could: I think I can, I think I can.

Pencil-tip pellets of snow drop to my notebook, demand attention: dandruff on a black dress. Plus they have a bounce to their step, a soundtrack to their entrance: Zing! Zing! Like those shoots of light that fall around Beast as he’s resurrected in front of an awed Belle, in front of an ensnared five year old watching through the screen.

I chase a fallen pellet with the tip of my fountain pen, inject it with ink. A tattoo. How this is beautiful and grotesque. The white pellet now a melted clump of black ink, like it never was once snow. How vision is an illusion, how it’s limited in its ability to tell the whole story, the whole history.

How history is an obsession of the writer (me).

 In this vein an image surfaces: crabs (writers) in a bucket. But the other crabs aren’t other writers, they’re me. All those claws, and clamoring for freedom. All  that truth. All those obsessions, and opinions-- they’re me.

***

There’s those leaves again, the ones who never let go. The ones who make their own schedule as to when. How they’re both brilliant and foolish. Tough-- but for what?-- they’ve already braved the winter. Ovid said: “Be patient and tough; someday this pain will be useful to you.”

 I’m thinking about my students at ACJ, how they embody these lone leaves: brittle, beat down, weathered, but connected. Holding on. To be a writer is to hold on.

***

One bird, then two, but they are far and unidentifiable. Then the giving of a red spot, a Cardinal. I feel glad to know his name-- this celebrity.

A school of baby stingrays fly over head and they dart nervously in unpredictable redirections.

As I focus on looking at/ for birds, it’s their sound that comes into focus. How could I have missed this?

It’s amazing, personalities galore.

-joyful

-whiney

-melancholic

-aggressive

-nimble

-friendly

-annoying

What’s going on? Why all the sounds?

I reprimand myself. I am silly to think that these noises are out of the ordinary. I feel further shame, in that I know birds are a big deal in the literary world. How quick I am to find birds and their metaphors in a text, but how blind I am to them in real life. That seems extremely disconnected to me.

The Cardinal lands on a lime log plank while I’m wallowing in my deficiencies.

Associations begin anew:

Christmas

Christmas in the Caribbean