What Is a Grackle?

A comfort common to Southwest desert parking lots, a familiar, a messenger, an overlooked angel oiled by asphalt, consolation of the casino, supermarket spiritual guide picking at a free-today hot dog, a dropped grape or lentil, its purple-green head iridescent, its long keel of a tail. Black birds but not blackbirds with their showy epaulettes blood-red as a war field. Grackles glint like lacquered ebony, the females brunhildas, if by brunhilda you mean “brown-headed,” not the German “ready for battle.” Blind to centuries of borders, of battles, they waddle stiff-legged at your feet, a janitorial sweep to their tails, checking cart tires and light poles for moths, beetles, singing their seven songs — slides, whistles, wheezes, catcalls, chirps, murmurs, clucks — to console you for your losses: stolen cars, mortgage payments spun to mist at a roulette table, the beloved who breathed fire and scorched your wedding clothes.Folly,wreckage, they mutter, down among the packs of backerboard and spackle.We’ve fallen from Mayan temples. In a past life