bird

in the thunderstormy part of spring the baby birds fall out of nests like soft hailstones. they are just out of their eggs, all skin and closed eyes and pointy ends and there is so much nothing to them it's hard to imagine the wind moving them at all. tiny bags of pinkish gray huddled down into nests in threes and fours. but the wind does catch them. and i don't know how it figures out how to toss only one from the nest, leaving a handful of quietly sleeping others behind. i have seen three or four during a single walk and wish i could move them off the sidewalks and stoops, put them on the newly breathing ground and let them go back to what little of nature we have here in brooklyn.

then midway through summer i am weeding in the mint and lemon balm and am not surprised to find one of those thunderstormy birds splayed out next to the basement door. i pull back a mint plant and see webby wings. a needle beak sticks into the dirt. and here i do not feel that urge to move the poor thing off the sidewalk. he is resting there in good dirt, dirt full of fragrant mint that shades the small body. i finish my weeding and leave the beak and the wings and the small, small claw feet.

today the air is fall woodsmoke cool and the sky is thunderstormy again and i stand over the basement door pulling up mint and lemon balm. the roots are not so deep but they are all connected, plants clutching at each other underground, refusing to go. i pull so hard on one clump i nearly land in the already cold-flattened irises and i see a white pebble fly through the air. it lands in loose dirt where i've already pulled mint. i reach for it and see beak, eye sockets pressed like thumbprints into the smooth curve of the forehead. the top of the skull is so thin i can see clumps of dirt inside.

i think about the deer skull i didn’t take home this summer because it wasn’t ready yet. this skull sits in the palm of my gardening gloves and rocks back and forth when i breathe. it is so much smaller than i remember the bird being, so delicate i can’t think clearly about what to do but i know i will take it in the house. i know i will keep it. the invisible things in the ground have cleaned it so there is nothing but boniness. and maybe the most beautiful thing i have seen in a very long time is the nostril on the beak of this skull, a watermelon seed of nothing in all that white of beak. or even the tiny strand of bone along the bottom of the eye socket. a strand of my own hair is thicker. the eye sockets are so large you can almost see those fat, babybird eyes bulging out of them. it is perfect. i put it in a cup of warm water and soap. it rests upside down on the surface a while, lighter than the soap bubbles.