Bird's-Eye View

Riel 43 Steven Riel Bird's-Eye View (on the 40th anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) Crossing the bridge at midnight, I'm halted by a stare more unsettling than blinding darkness: an American bittern freezes amid reeds and debris and waits for me to pass. But I'm transfixed by topaz eyes that outstare mine with nocturnal wisdom and suspicion. Cagey without being caged, stooped as a bag woman, it stands absolutely motionless against a containing wall. I'm the one who blinks. Incandescent streetlights blanch its plumage to dowdy olive and buff —camouflage without the Audubon gloss— reminding me of the racoons in my dumpster, curled into each other's musk and hissing at me, their fur dank and dingy—nothing like the sleek coats worn at football games, or even the dirtiest boy's Daniel Boone cap— a filthy grey, fit only for blending into this last available home. At night, I've watched them, finicky as heirs, rinse in rainwater puddles on the roof next door whatever treasures they've gleaned from the garbage. They shun the Charles, its water sudsy and brown as beer, for this American rooftop almost out of human sight. Silently, I sit with the lights off and strain to see them through the screens. Where did they go once the garbage collector brought a covered dumpster? Soon after, their replacement appeared: a man rattling a grocery cart picks through our shit each dawn, seeking redeemable bottles. Only scavengers have survived our arrival, those who'll feast in alleys on our refuse: the gulls and crows that wage gang war over Woolworth's; 44 the minnesota review skunks; rats; and so far, this bittern, as it scrounges through Styrofoam cups, sneakers, scum, wades past MAN POWER written on a rusted tin can, as it braves streetlights, waits under my eyes— yet I'm the one outlasted, scrutinized. Through this shrewd bird's ancient gaze, I measure every step we've taken since the Pilgrims came; every carrier pigeon, wild turkey shot down; every buffalo slaughtered, and no thanks given; every treaty with the native peoples broken; every uranium mine irradiating their reservations; the firewater, firearms, burning fever, fireballs we've brought them; how we named this river after a doomed king in the hope it led all the way to China instead of Hopkinton—an unexpectedly quick end, given the width of its mouth. From here, just upriver, across from a failed watch factory, it leads to a cemetary in which headstones spread always westward into the newly-cleared land. —Our nation's history laid out before me like an aerial photograph of Hiroshima, demolished, seen from above but not with the detachment displayed by Tibbets, our ace pilot, on his first flight: / could see the unfortunate earth-bound mortals crawling around like ants. To see like a bird, beyond the earth-bound's horizon, to view what only the mind's eye had imagined till recently, a nightmare, on a waking city... Your performance was perfect, a general wrote him. By this bridge, this grocery cart driven into the river by 12-year-old boys on a lark and now half-submerged among delicate lily pads, I'm stricken with a grief this bittern cannot share but helped me to own prospectively while there's still time Riel 45 to mourn and move beyond this devastation, this perfection, as the bittern tiptoes through our trash, forever ready to take wing, just now waiting for us to disappear. ...