Vesper Sparrows

I love to watch them sheathe themselves mid-air, shut wings and ride the light’s poor spine to earth, to touch down in gutters, in the rainbowed urine of suicides, just outside Bellevue’s walls. From in there the ransacked cadavers are carried up the East River to Potter’s Field as if they were an inheritance, gleaned of saveable parts, their diseases jarred and labeled, or incinerated, the ashes of metastisized vision professing the virus that lives beyond the flesh in air ... The first time I saw the inside of anything alive, a downed bird opened cleanly under my heel. I knelt to watch the spectral innards shine and quicken, the heart-whir magnify. And though I can’t say now what kind of bird it was, nor the season, spring or autumn, what dangerous transition, I have identified so many times that sudden earnest spasm of the throat in children, or in the jaundiced faces of the dying, the lower eye-lids straining upward. Fear needs its metaphors. I’ve read small helplessnesses make us maternal. Even the sparrows feel it, nesting this evening in traffic lights. They must have remembered, long enough to mate, woods they’ve never seen, but woods inbred up the long light of instinct, the streaked siennas of a forest floor born now into the city, the oak umbers, and the white tuft of tail feathers like a milkweed meadow in which their song, as Burroughs heard it, could be distinguished: come-come-where-where-all-together- down-the-hill ...