As If a Bird Flew By Me: A Novel

Blackbird Sky

121 BLACKBIRD SKY I can barely tell apart the birds from leaves in my neighbor’s yard, yet thousands of blackbirds just settled there, disappearing into the foliage. The dusk sky crowds low rain clouds together , where shades of grey push and blur against each other. Looking at the tops of my neighbor’s maples, I see silhouettes of individual birds if I look carefully, if I squint. Yet I can’t tell how many trees have birds in them because their silhouettes act as mirages. My eyes strain and falter, focus and fail. But the noise quantifies. A cacophony of birds pop and call and creak, the discord of chiming and chattering broken occasionally by an individual whistling a few discernible notes, clear as a town crier. One clear voice gives locality to the confusion . I’m on my front porch across the street from the birds, and all I can do is stare. I don’t know where the birds come from or how they find each other and form a large flock like this. But it is as if all the birds in this valley have settled their black bodies to talk on my street. The clamor gets in my veins, straight from the blood vessels in my eardrums to my extremities. It’s shrill and uncomfortable . Slightly sinister, warbling like the end of the a.m. dial. The birds come in two waves, one right after the other, before settling among the trees. This blackbird surf gets me imagining the clouds of passenger pigeons that blackened the sky before extinction. For a half a second, I feel like I’m at the 122 turn of the century, wings blotting out the sun as the rumble and scrape of millions of brown doves’ wings fill my ears. It’s hard to breathe, my eyes and ears saturated with flight stop my lungs, so I choke. I cough back feathers and risen dirt. But I am awed as a mass of pigeons flies by, leaving me behind in their trail of lost feathers. The blackbirds overhead hover in the sky in an indecipherable Braille, a whole novel of black dots spilled into the sky, shifting. The birds advance as elastic, a school in the sky, moving as a group, leaderless, a joint mind directing them. Away, right, left, down, up. Few falter or stray. The group is tight as careful choreography. They lull me, pushing into my unconscious , so when I sleep I see them as a cloud of feathers sweeping against another, against my eyelids and torso and arms. I stand under a tree and it shivers and shimmies with blackbirds rustling their feathers, feathers falling down to dust the street like the gift from some random but dreamy god. As the flock waits for whatever they wait for, stragglers pass over the tops of the trees picking up and losing members. The flock originally moved in from the southwest, all birds traveling in one direction, down the street, along the line of trees, northward . Now another smaller flock pushes in, stalling above the tree with the most birds. Then the new group splits in half and goes in opposite directions. The rest lands three trees down. The blackbirds are grouping and slowly proceeding along my street, not going south, but in the opposite direction that they need to travel to stay warm and alive for the winter. But they only advance northward for a block. Some bird species use the sun as a compass during the day. Or others guide themselves at night with Polaris and other stars and constellations. Perhaps the birds are in my neighborhood to rest and wait for the sky to clear after the residual rain of a hurricane gone inland. When the sky clears, little receptors in their thousands of similarly programmed brains point to the 123 North Star. The birds will look up and orient themselves south by it. More than I can do. I can hardly get up the stairs of my house in the dark. The blackbirds on my street probably also recognize certain natural landmarks like rivers and vistas, and perhaps, the unnatural , like freeways and the capitol. Do they think, when they come back in the spring, Oh, we are almost Home—there’s the stadium, the parking lots, and now I can rest? Their brains are also rigged to pick up magnetic fields...