Flightless Birds

Thursday, December 31, 2020

The year is ending, and I feel nothing.

The year is ending, and I feel empty.

The year is ending, and I don’t know how much I’ve been feeling since the first day of November, the day following Halloween, following a full moon, following another round of emptiness, I saw five to seven dead birds.

There were, I think, at least five to seven of them. At least I think I saw that many.

I had been smoking a joint with my friend Joe, we were up on the roof, when I saw them. Absentminded and staring at the black beneath us, it took a while before I realized what I was seeing.

That’s a dead bird, I said.

The words left my mouth like a curse, willing more corpses to emerge from the tar that was caking their fragile, now flightless, bodies.

It must have been a tar spill. They must have all landed there. They had been unable to get back up. It wasn’t a scene I could easily look away from. As they laid there, their bodies mangled.  Flightless, birds tarred and feathered.

I can’t stop thinking about them.

But I think I’m not really thinking about the dead birds, five to seven of them.

I’m thinking about me seeing them.

The year is ending, and for months the birds remained on the roof and the birds remained in my head, wings un-beating, my mind unrelenting and searching.

Birds, sparrows, such small, gentle, homely creatures.

The sheer number: five to seven.

And the way they seemed to emerge from the tar, caked in muck, feathers ruffled, one by one, showing themselves to me, and it was me who noticed them.

The year is ending, and I’m stuck on birds.

The birds: stuck, in the tar, in my head,

casualties of human folly.

The year is ending and I think of how the birds are trapped now. Devoid of flight—

of their meaning but are they really? five to seven dead birds, and I can’t stop myself from thinking

but what is a bird that cannot fly?