We have a wonderful woodstove here in our Oregon house that heats the whole upstairs, so I decided to get it going to take the chill off this morning. I opened the lid and began wadding sheets of newspaper and stuffing them inside. I was all business and just about had a heart attack when a small bird flew straight up out of the stove, whizzed past my head and landed across the room. I was immediately startled, completely awed and a little bit frightened by the sudden presence of this wild creature. I figured it must be a fledgling as it only flew in short spurts and not very high. It was covered with a dusting of ashes and although it wasn’t trembling or chirping I sensed the bird’s fragility as it sought to orient itself in this foreign environment of “inside.” Also present in this diminutive creature was the indomitable will to survive and to escape, as it headed straight for the clear glass of the windows, to the tall trees and patches of sky it saw there. Because the day before had been quite warm the stove had remained unlit, making me aware that it was very likely the bird had been in that soot-blackened stove for 24 hours or more with no means of escape.

To get some counsel on what to do with the bird I called my husband in L.A. He was a boy scout in his youth and an experienced woodsman. I rely on him heavily for his clear head and practical advice when it comes to navigating such situations. After giving him all the details together we concluded that to release the bird, instead of capture it and take it to a sanctuary, was the best course of action. It appeared healthy and, as it was capable of flying on its own, we felt it would be better served by being returned to its natural habitat. After taking a picture of the confused little guy as it crouched halfway under the sofa, I caught it and cupping it close to my chest, carried it to the window and let it go. It rocketed out of my hands and flew in a ragged pattern diagonally across the driveway, landing in the tall grass under a pine tree.

The sensation of that small, vibrating body nestled in my palms stayed with me throughout the day and into the night. The whole experience felt holy somehow, like the bird and I had acted as catalysts, each for the other, revealing both the tenuous nature of our existence and the unbridled wonder of it, in such a tender and forgiving way. I will never know if the bird survived, if its mother found it, as my husband suggested she might. I do know that the spirit of the bird and the memory of our brief encounter will live on as message and metaphor in the lore of my own mythology, to be savored and re-savored–a little bit of winged magic fallen from the sky one spring day.

Later that same day…

I finally got out for a walk in the woods across from our house, here at the foot of the mountains. It’s been ten days and for some reason or another I’ve been avoiding it. I practically had to push myself out the door, away from the couch and the TV and my desire for comfort. I followed the deer trails. I would start out on one and then wander off, only to find another going a completely different direction. I veered away from the roads and houses, the sound of people talking. There were the tiniest of wildflowers blooming in the dry soil. I fell in love with each violet, yellow, and rusty red blossom. There were twisted, old stumps laying on their sides, slowly sinking back into the earth. I skirted several red anthills, a hawk circled, a solitary deer bounded through the bitterbrush and sage. There was a heart shaped lava-rock that fit perfectly in my closed hand and two rusted cans that had been used for target practice. (These last three items I picked up and brought home for some reason I can’t explain.) As I stepped out from the woods and crossed the paved road, drawn to the meadow and the golden grasses shimmering in the fading light, I was so grateful for the wisdom of nature, how absolutely embracing she is, how she draws no line between the living and the dead, the budding and the decaying, how they mingle amongst each other as an enduring reminder to the short-sighted of what has always been true, of how we are simultaneously of this earth and not of it. I turned back to the asphalt road and back to my sweet house on the meadow, taking what I found, leaving a few footsteps in the dust.

A BIRD CAME DOWN THE WALK

A bird came down the walk:
He did not know I saw;
He bit an angle-worm in halves
And ate the fellow, raw.

And then he drank a dew
From a convenient grass,
And then hopped sidewise to the wall
To let a beetle pass.

He glanced with rapid eyes
That hurried all abroad, –
The looked like frightened beads, I thought
He stirred his velvet head

Like one in danger; cautious,
I offered him a crumb,
And he unrolled his feathers
And rowed him softer home

Than oars divide the ocean,
Too silver for a seam,
Or butterflies, off banks of noon,
Leap, plashless, as they swim.

Emily Dickinson
The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson
Barnes & Noble, Publisher

FULL MOON THAT STRIKES
THE EARTH COLD

or to be young geese again
on the night of their first
migration: two angled lines
joined only at the vertex.
A week ago the full moon

that strikes the earth cold
began a thin blue air
in the distance that parted
for the V of your leaving.

Karen McCosker
A Poem A Day
Steer Forth Press, Publisher