Underbirded

Fall has always felt more like a beginning. A going-inwardness. I imagine a cracked eggshell rewinding, the fluffy birdling shrinking into its primordial slickness, into apostrophe, entering the shell, bits of the shell claiming its original place in the oval of things. Egg tooth pecking at membrane. Now just an egg, warm in the curve of a nest.

I cleaned out the gardens yesterday. I stripped the brussels sprouts from the stalks. I uprooted dozens of tomato plants, pea-sized tomatoes bursting under my boots. I uprooted stalks of lettuce, surprised by their shallow roots. Small, fresh lettuce leaves are sprouting. I left the perennial herb garden alone. I left the tobacco plants standing, their purple flowers trumpeting at the sun that sires the sky.

I am entering the season of books. Of walks of a darker nature. Of starkness and brown smells. Of pulling down the sun visor during the commute home from work. The asters age without complaint. The leaves mottle and marble. The roads are stained with walnut or deer blood. Water is louder. Acorns roll along the asphalt. The first hard frost has been ushered in.

I pile my books. So many subjects and always the same amount of not enough time. It is the time of year where I want to get to the substratum of things. The plasma. Clarice Lispector’s Agua Viva. She wrote I want to write to you like someone learning and I say I want to love you, I want to live this life, I want to put my hands in the dirt, I want to hold my hand open to everything…like someone learning. She wrote I want to grab hold of the is of the thing and I say I want to grab hold of the am of me.

At a recent Audubon meeting, someone mentioned that a certain place was underbirded. Not enough people are walking into the woods and stopping. Not enough people are raising their binoculars to see something closer. Not enough people are taking note, observing, reporting back.

Feeling underbirded myself, I browse my current daily journal. Observations but no reflection. What I did, but not how I feel. A small frost here. A haiku there. A Wendell Berry quote. This month is flying by, I wrote of September. Skimming surfaces but not digging into the stratigraphy. Not entering the forest and raising my binoculars. Not reporting back.

So, I stopped dedicating significant amounts of time and energy to the short-form. I have been feeding a chicken who walks out of the woods every morning. I write letters. I attempt to dredge meaning from every interaction. I go on walks. I re-read and try to understand. I see the feathers, the beak, the scaly talons.

On yesterday’s walk along the river, red-winged blackbirds moved like smoke between the trees. Their clarinet of music accompanied the rustling of catalpa leaves, almost neon yellow now. That’s something magical about the catalpas. How they glow against the darkening clouds.