Animal Eye

Closer

83 Closer The magpie comes and all I can think is beauty, beauty, though you said it is a junk bird, though its commonness makes most ignore it: the blue bands vibrant against the oil black, the white chest and belly, the glistening eye and its feet like rotted arteries branching off into snow: this is how thin they are in the world, this is how wretched and delicate. And the ugly gurgle at the back of its throat, how it is always laughing like a broken kettle, and yet there it is still: beauty, beauty and I am charmed by what the bird cannot help but do with its long sweep of tail, its startling accusations of color: not like the twelve drab quail I’ve seen parading the street early evening, dust-streaked adolescents drunk from feasting on the neighbor’s berries. They are so fat and stupid these birds, I cannot love them for the little comma of feather bobbing on their heads. I cannot love them for the way they insist on running as a means of first escape until, at last, in one great muffled clap they rise, and the sound 84 of their winging is a dull thunder, a thousand bed sheets pulled from the line and shaken together. Then I can love them, as I love the garden with its pockets of stone, forgetting the warning others would give of starting what must be abandoned too soon or too late, as we are ourselves too soon or too late: the problem of beauty being how it must be always distant, observable, taken apart. As if preference were all that marked us: pale ridgelines of grasses darkening out into blades of blood— It would be easier, always, to imagine how unlike we are than see how we have put our own needs in the other’s mouth. Watch with me. I am the one who ignores the magpie, garden, the commonness of a world that can’t keep its favors secret. I am the one abandoning the vision that preens outside this window, calling itself beauty, beauty as if I must name it, as if I must name you and me opposed or part of it: we are ourselves, always, just outside the definition. 85 If there is a taste, a border, a particularity, then what are we to each other? I come closer. The garden is changing. Fat buds spill in the sun, redden greedily at the tips. Look: another row of poppies opens. And in their yellow cups, bees. ...