You can’t put birds in poems anymore. I just learned this—from a poet who knows this poet who apparently has the updated poetry manual. I said I understood: we’re not allowed to put hands in short stories.
But then everywhere I looked, birds in poems. There were song-sought warblers, sandhill cranes lifting like faint gods at dusk, Inca doves that make their home in the ironwood. A poem would be about feudal weaponry and then, boom, a bird in the last couplet. I couldn’t find a poem that didn’t have a bird in it, if you counted the ironic ones. Birds were watched through windows after people made love. They turned up as the thing dead and mourned by the roadside, or were hailed for crossing an ocean using ancient optical magnets the scientists just learned about last year. The poets had them swirling and coasting, moving in great geometries, mostly reminding us humans of all the ways we can’t fly.
And it was not a poem but almost when the bride’s mother came back from the vending machine. Look, she said, Oklahoma. I put my book down. The one quarter she didn’t have yet, heads as always, tails a bird we didn’t know but looked up on the Comfort Inn’s internet connection: a scissortail flycatcher, soaring over a bed of Indian blanket. The ceremony was done at four and the party by seven. It rained the whole time. The town we were in was too small to go back to, so we were waiting for her son Adam and his girlfriend to come across the hall and watch the cable none of us got back home. I waited till the bride’s mother had closed her wallet and gone back to her book to open mine again.
When we turned the lights off, I thought I could hear the vending machine lolling its slotted tongue over its treasure, money dressed in poetry’s attire—birds and trees and, in the case of Ohio, flight itself.
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Who takes this man? The priest looked at both of them and spoke as if the bride were a question no one had ever been asked before. We waited, sweating, for a candle behind him to be lit. In the rafters, the ceiling fans spun their night-bicycled noise. The program gave away the ending: she would.
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Before she did, the bride and I were friends for a long time, years, though we lived in the same city only once. Mostly, we wrote letters. She wrote letters that would make you fall in love, which is what happened, we think. The thing was that no one really knew. The groom’s best friend said he just knew they had written to each other since college. In the motel room that night, her mother said that it was one Thanksgiving in Pennsylvania with him, and when she got back there were plans. I told her I found out in a letter.
She understands the power of what you don’t say, her mother told me.
I was one of the volunteers to camp on the in-laws’ farm after the wedding, but when the newsmen guaranteed rain a week out, the bride wrote: My mother will have an extra bed on the second night, and you’re welcome to stay with her. Our flights left around the same time, so I agreed to take the bed she wouldn’t need on her wedding night.
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My flight was late, wheels down after midnight, and I drove the rental car two hours north from Pittsburgh alone. I thought of you only at the rivers. Pulled over for coffee when I realized I’d crossed the Allegheny twice without knowing it.
There were two men in tunics ahead of me in line. The woman with them wore a falconer’s gauntlet on her belt. Everyone ordered quarter-pounders with cheese. Chris the manager convinced the raiders that the third-pounder Angus burger on the late-night menu was the closest to a quarter-pounder you could get at this hour. He spoke about raw meat volume and about value. Having left their swords in the Camry, they moved their sheaths aside to sit down at the booth. The maiden’s braids wrapped twice around her head.
The world was funny, but I was no longer telling it. I was night-driving, trespassing the insomniacs’ camp like a mute who takes communion just for the chance to use her tongue.
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The bride stood on the steps of the church to make her decree: Cake and punch will be served in the fellowship hall now. She wore shoes with pearl straps that dug in. Her mother wore polka dots and sat with the groom’s family. The bride’s father and I had not met before, but when he introduced me to his wife, we acted as if we had, and I offered to bring them both punch, even though I could see that she couldn’t have any.
The rain we’d been promised began, light at first. I watched it worry the surface of the punch and tried to remember how old I was when I still knew where the birds go before a storm.
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[Before Pittsburgh]
The night we ate the oysters, the front desk only had Scope, so that’s what we brushed with. The oysters were lined up like paint swatches—Duxbury, Wianno, Wellfleet, Salutation Bay. Having nothing absolved us: we did not plan to stop there.
One of us said something about an EconoLodge, I remember that much. The sea had gotten to us, and we agreed that stretch of 1A should be driven in daylight.
The place you turned in had a quiet clutch of rooms set off the highway, and a treed path to a convention hall with great ceilings and a drive that ringed the lawn. The doors to the hall opened often like gills, exhaling music and purple dresses. We sat at the fountain, brushing sand off our calves.
Listen to it, you said. That’s the jive, without a doubt. I said: If we had different shoes they’d let us in. We listened to heels click on the asphalt.
Stay here, you told me, and I waited while you went to check in. Later, when the ice machine woke us, I felt the mint sting on my cunt and gave thanks for the stranger who needed ice at three. You brought a washcloth to bed and dried my hands with it, and I lifted your head to take the wet towel without waking you, and who could prove these other than vows?
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When my mother called her mother to say she was to be married, her mother said that she had a very busy teaching schedule, and it would be hard for her to get there. She hadn’t even said when yet. We were drinking wine when she told me this, wearing sweaters in some air-conditioned happy hour last August, years after her mother was gone. Her second question was going to be, will you give me away? So instead she wore a suit. She said to me: Our hunger for contingency makes us weak.
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The bride’s mother took the bed by the window. Adam is going to breakfast with Bill, she said to me in the morning. She was already dressed, and watching the parking lot. Did he mention anything about breakfast last night? I said he hadn’t. The TV had tornado warnings for the next county. Rental cars were being returned in Pittsburgh, and down the road, her daughter was waking up in someone’s inn a wife.
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[Before the oysters]
We were on our way to the shore when you told me your mother was sick. She is in pain most of the time now, you said. You said: I cannot leave, so it is plain with us then. (If it were allowed, this is where I would say how I took your hand.)
Once I had dreamed to you about going back west, and you’d played along: Of course you could leave winter for these arms. Meaning mine. The children we were never sure of wanting were suddenly alive and there between us on the center console, but we knew by the way they struggled with the iPod charger that they could not live on both coasts at once.
I thought of the poets in the books I’d read, how this is where they would cut to a meditation on the migratory patterns of arctic terns, flying the distance to the moon in their lives but hardly ever landing, or the cliff swallow, a monogamist who insists on building her nest on the sheerest of margins. But I just looked out the window, the sea on my side, and listened to the swoop and caw of the seagulls, that sturdy bird of the prose writers—always stealing a character’s food, advancing plot, interrupting a conversation to keep the protagonist from saying what she means.
If you would stay near your mother, and I near you, then there would be cards home, flights at Christmas, calls on Sunday. But if my parents are to be more than a return address, and not hold the children gingerly, then—. I saw what my mother meant. We are contingent. I so believed this that when I got home I looked it up. Middle English, from the Middle French from Latin’s contingere: to befall.
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The problem with a small town is there are three breakfast places, and an ex-husband might take his son and his girlfriend to any of them. Knowing him, probably all three.
There is a McDonald’s down on Route 8, is that okay? the bride’s mother asked. I said I loved McDonald’s, and to prove it, I paid for hotcakes and an Egg McMuffin, no ham, no cheese. There were single, dye-tipped carnations in vases behind the booths, and the cable talking heads had found us, even here. I did not know where the bride was born, so her mother told me. A mountain town. I nodded. She and the bride’s father were high school sweethearts. God what was I thinking, she asked her hotcakes.
I didn’t mean to, but my head heavy with you, I nodded again.
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[Before the drive to the sea]
We had not talked for months, which have been declared small years in the country of our old bed.
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After McDonald’s, the bride’s mother and I walked around the town. It was ten on Sunday, and we could smell smoke from the VFW in the next block. Nothing was open but the churches. We stopped to look in a junk shop window taped with ads from a happened parade. The shop had antique license plates and end tables made with antlers and a bird nesting box that hung from a chain in the ceiling. The door is built too low, she said, pointing to it. See? And its mouth is too wide. She told me how big birds like ravens will eat the babies, or before that, the cowbird can get in and lay eggs, tricking a wren to raise birds so big her own will starve. Who builds a birdhouse without first reading about birds? We didn’t know, but we suspected they were in church.
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The obvious candidates for this construction project are the poets, who have spent their days apprenticing the birds. Who else has studied the properties of cedar and oak, and the diameter of a purple martin’s nest? Certain ones have transcribed encyclopedias of their songs. They know the hours a wren will spend in her nest, how far from the ground she builds it, and have memorized the wingspans of everything.
And since they can no longer safekeep the birds in verse, I propose the poets raise great numbers of bird houses to replace the ones I’m buying up to burn: nesting boxes with proper doors through which only the belonging birds will fit, structures to stand near more precarious trees.
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[Beginnings]
We worked in the same room. I am glad you are here, writing, while I use this glue gun. That’s the kind of thing you said. I told you to put awnings on everything, to bring the castle back. You said every story should have at least three walls in it, and every poem one high, unreachable window. We saved old bread for the ducks, though half the time we made French toast instead.
Back then, the things I wanted to tell you used to occur to me like the highway lines I tried to count as a kid by clicking my teeth, so fast and many that as soon as I had one it was gone. But now they happen like unfamiliar rivers you come to late at night and cross without knowing, until the ground returns itself beneath your wheels and you feel, through the radio dark, how it had been gone.
This piece originally appeared in and has been reprinted with permission of the author.
