The Reddened Flower, the Erotic Bird, and: Natural Grief

Out running one morning in early October, at the top of a hill, I found myself ten feet from an owl perched on a fencepost.

In its beak, a thick cord of taut tissue still attached to the squirrel, which twitched beneath the talons until the owl, seeing me, dropped it—

and we stood, staring at each other through the cold, barely lit air. I have told this so many times, but no one, I understand, will understand

the original rapture (yes, I’ll use that word) of that moment. Do we report stories like these—my mother calling me

to say she and my father saw a white (“not an albino! It had brown eyes”) deer in their yard; or Chelsea, almost breathless,

keys still in her hand, describing the sprinting shadow of the coyote she may or may not have seen but is pretty sure she had

near the train tracks less than a mile from our house— do we report them because they are stand-ins, almost,

for grace? And what cynicism keeps me from saying that we do so because we love, and are surprised by, the world?

Natural Grief

To see the four crows surrounding the fifth, the sick one, this morning and all afternoon as it died on our driveway, leaving its carcass and a smattering of sun-dried feces—to see them stay until one nudged the dead with its beak and, receiving no response, paused for a moment, a long moment, before taking a full and what looked like exaggerated stroke of its wingspan that lifted it away, an action the others followed. To see that long vigil through casual and then more frequent returns to the kitchen window and not think the birds feel something comparable to our sorrow would be, I think, a dismissive mistake. Like the phrase bearable tragedy. Or the condolence Well, he liveda long life. . . I kept hearing at my grandfather’s wake, in the same tone you’d use to justify a bad but free meal. Three days ago, our neighbor, Jane, an eight-year-old adopted as an infant from China, told us she was getting a baby sister, and yesterday, her arms around our dog, she told my wife that she and her parents weren’t going to China again, that something went wrong, that her sister’s blood test wasn’t right, something she didn’t understand. It’s weird, she said, to be sad about someone you haven’t met. Jane was left outside a hospital on a snowy night in December, wrapped in blankets. Her birth parents cared enough to make sure she’d be found. The crow seemed to weigh less than the bag I shoveled it into. When she saw me place it all in the garbage can on the curb, Jane asked what it was, and I lied. And then told her the truth.