Lynn Pedersen

It's best to wake early, four, five a.m., while the neighbors sleep and the moon floats like a pearl in a pool of ink. In half-light the empty house is less familiar, less sad—the walls with their nail holes, the carpet—its patterns of wear, curtains with no job to do. I sit on my suitcase, eat powdered donuts; a napkin for a plate, juice out of a paper cup. Make one last check of the cupboards, the drawers. Run my hand along the countertops, the stair rail, trace the walls with my fingertips, each scar proof of my childhood, my initials carved into the tree of this, our sixth house. My family could write a Handbook for Leaving— the way we pack up during summer solstice, disconnect from people and places like an abrupt shutting off of electricity. My father's convinced himself that the unknown is always better, the way the retina sees images upside down and the brain corrects. Here I smoked candy cigarettes, my breath in winter passing for smoke, pale green of my bedroom. I counted the number of intersections on the way to school (four). I bundle memories together, weight them with stones like unwanted kittens drowned in a creek. What kind of animal constantly moves? The point of migration is the return. We're nomads without the base knowledge of where to find water. These moves are like arranged marriages; economics now, love later. Maybe it's not against nature to move. Most of the body is no more than ten years old and blood renews itself every 90 days. But leaving disturbs the fabric of a place. I'd rather stay and witness change. My mother always wanting to plant perennials that we never stay to see. I pour some water on the marigolds clattering around the mailbox, Aztec flowers of death, their strong scent a beacon to lost souls. Then we drive away, the blank windows like the blank eyes of the dead, waiting for someone to seal the past with a penny.

Not to be confused with messenger pigeons, birds sent behind enemy lines in war, but think passengers as in birds carrying suitcases, sharing a berth on a train, or traveling in bamboo cages on a ship, always migrating on a one-way to extinction. How would extinction look on a graph? A steady climb, or a plateau, then a precipitous cliff at the dawn of humans? Nesting grounds eight hundred square miles in area. Skies swollen with darkening multitudes. Days and days of unbroken flocks passing over.Ectopistes migratorius. And the last of the species, Martha, named for Martha Washington, dies in a cage in 1914 at the Cincinnati Zoo. Forget clemency. We are the worst kind of predator, not even deliberate in our destruction. Our killing happens à la carte, on the side (side of Dodo?). And because the nineteenth century did not enlist a battlefield artist for extinctions, there are no official witnesses to the slaughter, just participants. If you could somehow travel back to this scene, through the would-be canvas, you would run flailing your arms toward the hardwood forests and the men with sticks and guns and boiling sulphur pots to bring birds out of the trees, as if you could deliver 50,000 individual warnings, or throw yourself prostrate on the ground, as if your one body could hold sway.

It’s not hard to imagine: my ancestor—a dry season, dust like chalk on her tongue—mixes spit with clay, traces a river on rock. Next day: rain. Why shouldn’t she believe in the power of rock and her own hand? I carry this need for pattern and rule, to see connections where there aren’t necessarily any. After my first miscarriage, I cut out soda, cold cuts. After the second, vacuuming and air travel. After the third—it’s chalk and spit again. I circle rocks, swim the icy river. And when my son is born, he balances the chemical equation that is this world. And logic? Logic is my son’s kite, good so long as you have wind, string, something heavier than hope to tether you.

Pattern or absence of pattern, the way a jet flies into blankness yet leaves a clear trail, I expect time to reveal an underdrawing, hatching of shadows, some rough plan visible through another spectrum of light. Once, at an ophthalmologist’s office, through an accident of mirrors, I saw the interior of my own eye, the retina’s veins like roots or a web, and then again ten years later, this time in an astronomy book—galaxies, clusters of galaxies, superclusters of galaxies strung out strands of a cosmic web, the redness of that image, the light extending like roots 13 billion years in every direction. Michelangelo could see a figure in a block of stone, waiting to be freed. I want his vision when I look in a mirror, his mathematical principles for depicting space, his ability to translate three dimensions into stone. First I’m in two dimensions, a photograph glued to the glass; then three—I’m somewhere between the glass and the background. All my houses, friends come and gone. How would he sculpt me? How far out of the stone have I come?