American Bittern

My birding friends, folks you don’t know, I met them after my move, when I took up bird watching, like to introduce me to other birders with the story of my sharp eye— an American Bittern spotted among the dry cattails in a roadside ditch on Texas’s Gulf Coast. This stout brown member of the heron family has straw-colored stripes running down its neck and chest, and when hiding it stands with its head back and pointy beak skyward (like someone new to the big city or maybe more intent like a sword swallower) and sways with the breeze to blend in with the reeds. They’re solitary birds. And I saw one at 55 mph and asked Damien to stop the car—the best sighting of that birding trip. It stood there as if its cover hadn’t been blown. I’m still learning to identify birds by their songs, but the bittern’s call is easy— unmistakable, like a small and heavy thing—padlock, stone—thrown in a pond. It reminded me, when I heard it, of you, or rather, that night after we weren’t us anymore but still had some little lust for each other, and you said this was all we could do, and when I thought we were done you got up in the dark, which was new for us, and went to the bathroom and turned on the light to see the toilet and opened your mouth to let what of me was in you drop heavy to the water, before you came back to bed where all I had to hold was that hollow sound.