Thomas R. Smith

It’s like so many other things in life to which you must say no or yes. So you take your car to the new mechanic. Sometimes the best thing to do is trust. The package left with the disreputable-looking clerk, the check gulped by the night deposit, the envelope passed by dozens of strangers— all show up at their intended destinations. The theft that could have happened doesn’t. Wind finally gets where it was going through the snowy trees, and the river, even when frozen, arrives at the right place. And sometimes you sense how faithfully your life is delivered, even though you can’t read the address.

My route lassos the outskirts, the reclusive, the elderly, the rural— the poor who clan in their tarpaper islands, the old ginseng hunter Albert Harm, who strings the "crow's foot" to dry over his wood stove. Shy eyes of fenced-in horses follow me down the rutted dirt road. At dusk, I pedal past white birches, breathe the smoke of spring chimneys, my heart working uphill toward someone hungry for word from the world. I am Mercury, bearing news, my wings a single-speed maroon Schwinn bike. I sear my bright path through the twilight to the sick, the housebound, the lonely. Messages delivered, wire basket empty, I part the blue darkness toward supper, confident I've earned this day's appetite, stronger knowing I'll be needed tomorrow.

I am a student of wrens. When the mother bird returns to her brood, beak squirming with winged breakfast, a shrill clamor rises like jingling from tiny, high-pitched bells. Who’d have guessed such a small house contained so many voices? The sound they make is the pure sound of life’s hunger. Who hangs our house in the world’s branches, and listens when we sing from our hunger? Because I love best those songs that shake the house of the singer, I am a student of wrens.