An Ever of Salt

That Great Blue Heron stands for one steady thing in the meanwhile of misfortune, stands so still he could be something chipped in time from a slab of gray granite. So small is his head, and his smaller yellow eye the French knot embroidered in the middle of such smooth gunmetal plumage, he might have been rendered here from silk or dreams or oils dabbed by the delicate brush of Audubon himself. Oh, meanwhile

of misfortune, ever-present since mischance befell us. How can we live this way? Mischance? Forgetting, he stood; beneath a beam of steel, its lip, he rose as though hell-bent to skim the crown right off, to top his skull from the mastoids up. Think blunt. Think carapace; an upturned nest, its thrown-off eggs; think a porcelain cup cradling the lopped shell, soft- boiled ooze of what’s exposed—but not, simply scrambled now beyond all thought. And if the hypothetical bird would let me cup, if he’d let me place my cool palms around his face, this face of-a-bird, this face-of-reason-and-truth itself, would the still-point of his breath align my fears and hopes, smooth feathers, and still panic beating to burst my heart? But of course,

how could it bring relief, this imagined act, how could it bring back the one I love. He’s here, yes; I love him still. Still. His breath at night so soft I place my hand against the cool plane between blades where wings would sprout, to see that life still courses in, and out. In the fraught meanwhile that is each night, in the meanwhile of misfortune’s long hours when shaken his brain rests in its brokenness, unstressed, my mind darts

skittering like minnows beneath shadows the Great Blue Heron makes, waiting, his eye blinking from below to above and back, while this other mind swims uneasily between what’s known and lost. He twitches; I watch. Body writhes; mind flips to encircle some thought swimming away. Here, gone. And the eye (mine) watching

both, never closes. Who am I? Trying to see where body and shadow meet, worrying the rift like a torn nail, its frayed edge rimmed red—small eye of a beast sought by a preying self, nursing the pain of a talon or claw pulled askance. And the mind, meanwhile, afraid of what bites at the heart of the dark-even-by-day-mind, an ever of salt seeming endlessly-flung over the shoulder, and a sting in the cut of not knowing when and whether a bridge will ever span the lake again. Oh, those of you who pray this would be the moment to pray for me . . .

For once both patience and light stood within a body unbroken before me, within one whose laugh was quick to dip beneath any surface with ease, whose face was the granite cliff of composure itself only until the warm shaft of sun washed across it . . . Where no tears fell, now silent streams. The red-cheeked burn. The no longer being inside. And Audubon’s birds. How lifelike they seem. Love, slippage, and we paint over the messy stuff. And the bird- mask, damn! And the things one does. The way in the meanwhile a table gets set. The bed. The bath. The children fed. Because the meanwhile of misfortune happens again and again.

Twitch below the left eye, the sign he’s lost himself in a fog of down. Sometimes all I want is the promise nothing was lost, all that was can be as it was unchanged. And the bird, his head, tiny goblet of bone, tiny globe of shell, of bone that holds the far-off-thought-he’s-thinking even-in-this-invisible-minute; the minute flicker of cadmium eye, the sable gash above that twitch. And the way accident rose up to seize and swallow us in a rush, before the slow-motion unfolding of wings, the whoosh up and rowing down too slow to be happening yet already happened, done, and the unlikely ascent, when the least likely thing...