heron

Bird Box & Glitter Bomb

The sun melts the frost and the wind blows downriver with the iron scent of snow. I zip-up my down vest.

Monday, March 16th, with public schools closed through April, the University emptied, people working in offices booting up laptops to work from home, and the announcement that all Oregon restaurants and bars are ordered closed yet to come later in the day. Circles tighten.

There’s no one else on the road. Christmas-morning-style silent empty streets, yet without the tingling expectation of warmth and fellowship to come with cinnamon and cider. There’s a flagger ahead on the parkway and I’m startled construction work is still progressing at the stadium. She flips her sign to “Slow” when she sees us, the only car for miles. I wave as we pass, yet a clench and fleeting guilt that I’ll be stopped and asked for my papers crossing the frontier.

Everything clenched. Dominoes tipping in slow motion grasped in triple time.

The long grass in the fields is wet. The dog and I walk out to the canal. There is no one else. As we tread the open space, I decide this is my estate and inheritance and that I am its Lady, surveying the opening green haze of the willows and cottonwood and translating the song of a red winged blackbird. Breathe here, a cold wind bright sun burning my cheeks, remember this.

Canada geese post sentries for their flock and these sentries watch us approach and escort the smaller birds further away in an orderly retreat. I keep Mercy tight-in on her lead until we pass, and then release her to dash to the water.

The heron. We withdraw to let her fish in peace and move down the canal, the dog working the bank where the nutria dig their dens. The song of the blackbird repeats a phrase from an ancient reed pipe. So it is, and was, and will ever be.

I read somewhere, probably Reddit, that a clever teacher uses glitter to teach her first-grade students to visualize otherwise invisible germs. At the beginning of the school day, a spoon of glitter is dished into the hand of one student. At the end of the day, the class looks to see where they can find glitter. It is everywhere.

Blindfolded with a Bird Box.

The sun is high enough now, the frost is melting. Time to go.

Mystery

I worked on the 14^th floor of the bank tower in downtown Portland. As part of June’s Rose Festival celebration, upriver bridges lifted for ships to pass through to dock downtown. Crowds gathered to greet sailors at the docks, to stand in line for tours along the towering decks. No one returned to witness the cranking castoff and engine reverse at the end of the pageant, when the ships turned their steel bows back out to sea and rose petals blew black on the sidewalk. I watched from the tower window.

I rode the Burnside bus. My stop came at the foot of a pocket park between the bank tower and Mary’s Strip Club. There are upright canines plying downtown streets, the jackal-men, the wolves, coyotes, and hounds. One December morning, I stepped off the bus behind two men. One pulled a package of raw chicken from the waistband of his pants, meat stolen a dozen blocks up Burnside from the Safeway store where they boarded. As I crossed the park, one tore the plastic wrap away, crouched down and ripped at the dimpled fat with yellow teeth, vapor from their co-mingled breath wreathing as they huffed at flesh and disappeared in fog.

Sometimes I took the elevator down to the street to smoke, coat-less in the cold. I wore cobbled black pumps like retreaded tires and shivered in a faux-silk polyester blouse. When she saw me braced against the wind on the sidewalk, Audrey turned her loopy-wheeled shopping cart up 5^th to ask for a cigarette. Her left eye was lazy and drifted to doze as we talked. She traveled with an old Yorkie bedded down on the black plastic bags stacked in her cart. When I gave her a cigarette, Audrey tucked it behind her ear and drew down her navy surplus cap. She didn’t smoke, she said, she needed to trade it for something to feed the dog.

I walked the pedestrian alleyways and sidewalks downtown. Coyotes crouched on flattened cardboard drumming stubble cheeks with stained fingernails. I worked my way across city blocks diagonally, crossing streets as traffic ebbed and stalled, skirting construction pits, smoke-eyed poodles with pink hair and script tattoos, wolves with red silk ties wheeling Humvees into valet parking. I moved to another city and took another job in another downtown, another one skimming the concrete fringe, searching out my own reflection in plate glass windows.

***

In the freezing fog of November, the camp in the oaks collapsed to a heap of canvas and nylon, a single shoe, broken glass. We walk up river, skirting crushed plastic bottles and clothing shreds the dog takes into her teeth and thrashes, if I let her. This one is a pirate seeking booty. I scout the ground as we walk, scanning for the glint of needles or orange syringe caps.

We pick our way down the bank, over black rocks, to the river. Great Blue Heron fish alone, still as snag, feathers blending with the timbre of the current. Sheltered by reeds and overhung alder, I startle a bird from her reverie beside an eddy. The heron cries out before launching aloft over the river. Chastened, I counsel the dog as we watch her flight dissolve in the mist.

The scent of water and wet dog settles over me, walking out singular, but not alone, into the open places, another vagrant, another mutt looking for home. There may be meaning in daring a place among this enigmatic array of earthly things, though it eludes me still.

I whistle for the dog and walk out, listening. These secrets are beside the river, if they are anywhere. There are fierce shy birds hidden there along the bank, birds the color of water.

Fog seeps in during the dark morning hours and licks at windows and jambs. It may dissolve by noon, or it may settle and weep for a week. Out of the valley, above, the sky is bitter blue and the sun radiant. Waiting in traffic, playing with the radio.

One or the other, not both. Choose.

At some point the building inspector comes to check the new hot water heater installed yesterday. There’s a sign stapled outside displaying the permit number. The old tank started leaking and a towel laid to soak up the rivlet needed changing twice a day, wringing out one and barricading with another, hanging the wet one out on the deck railing to drip. It’s a hybrid hot water heater with wifi, warming a tank of water via heat rummaged from the air. It looks like the robot from Lost in Space.

D. managed the replacement, as with all the structural and engineering things that go wrong in a household because he’s a wizard, moving my plastic bins packed full of salvaged wrapping paper and Christmas ornaments from the garage shelves to run the condensate line along the wall to drain outside, and then stacking them carefully back. Before the young men came to install the new heater, I took a long hot shower and combed through my hair with my fingers to shed any honey locust leaves, because civilization is held together with duct tape.

Dancers learn to spot during an extended turn, during a fouetté, a pirouette, to maintain body line and balance without becoming dizzy. A dancer focuses her eyes on a fixed point as she turns, whipping her head around ahead of the turning body to maintain equilibrium.

Pick a farther spot, one in the middle distance, and don’t let go.