The Red-Bellied Woodpecker as Grief--Blog Entry #8 (Prompt #1)

I saw the red-bellied woodpecker on a walk in the forest with my father. It was after my uncle died. We were walking to a small stream to fish. My father was still mourning and I was too young to understand. I still remember the strikingly barred back of the red-bellied woodpecker as if white and black ribbons were sewn into his spin. He had a haunting beauty with his red cap, black-knifed beak, and pale body—a kind of beauty that could scare you away if you really focused on it, that could numb you. His body punctured the side of a dead snag and from his position I gathered he had only one eye. And that one eye stared down into my father and me, into our bodies, and sometimes I think I can still feel it. That eye was the smallest dark I’d ever seen and I knew something had to be darker inside of it.

He flew quickly and erratically through the forest, all around us, abruptly changing directions, alighting for an instant and immediately taking off again. All the while letting out a glut of long and deafening shrills, rolling kwirr or churr calls, coughing cha cha cha cries, throaty growls at the other birds, at the earth, at us. “Listen,” my father said, “listen to that violent sound.” This odd behavior is categorized as a type of play to help young birds escape predators, but it felt more like an evasive taunting as if our big bodies were this small body’s prey.

In the moment we finally caught him, when he finally let his body rest, and his throat quiet, he was wedging a large caterpillar into the barked scar of a tree. His long, sticky tongue teasing it, his one nail drilling into the seized caterpillar body, breaking it apart into manageable pieces that he could devour. He did devour them; all those bright pieces of caterpillar sliding down his throat into a dark hole. He was as unforgettable as grief. He was grief and the caterpillar was my father’s heart. I took them both out of the forest that day, my father and the red-bellied woodpecker—that one eye, that dark hole, and those two pale bodies. 

The Woodpecker

By Elizabeth Madox Roberts

The woodpecker pecked out a little round hole 

And made him a house in the telephone pole.

One day when I watched he poked out his head,
And he had on a hood and a collar of red.

When the streams of rain pour out of the sky,
And the sparkles of lightning go flashing by,

And the big, big wheels of thunder roll,
He can snuggle back in the telephone pole.

The Dirt that Holds Us--Blog Entry #7

Sunday, March 24, 2013

1:30pm

37˚F

"Its arrogance will break your heart"

As I sit under this long white sky, I ask myself what I’m really doing here. Why do I come to this cemetery? Is it because I want to know about dying? Is it because I wonder what these bodies all around me already know? Do they know? Can they tell me where my soul will leave my body or if it will? Can they tell me who will protect my body after death? Can they tell me anything I don’t already know? Maybe when it happens, when we are severed from this life, our souls forget we ever lived. Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad. Would it be fair for us to die and then continue to die knowing what we have lost? Some say it is worse for the ones left behind. The families that have to deal with the sky every morning, knowing its blue will rise over a world missing of someone.

Something is new here today. There are no deer anywhere in sight, but all around me there are freshly buried bodies. I have never seen this before—bodies so vulnerable. The only thing separating them from the world, from me, is the dirt. For the first time, I don’t feel welcome here. I feel like I’m invading on this space. That this is something I shouldn’t see. Before this moment, I could forget the bodies were under this ground because they were hidden. There were no mounds of dirt rising out of the earth to remind me. There were only gravestones that acted as shields as if they were symbols of the bodies and that the actual bodies didn't exist. But now I know they are here and I feel like I'm exploiting them. I’m looking at these bodies in their most fragile states and they have no knowledge of my eyes. They have no way of breaking my stare. They have no names. They are alone with only the dirt separating them.

"Two weeks ago / we had to coax it / into taking her body"

At this moment, I begin to realize the importance of the dirt. The way it is able to cover the bodies with its burnt orange body without breaking—a dirt body made up of thousands of individual pieces of body. How much we need the dirt in death. How much we need it to tell our love ones that yes we are gone, that yes this dirt is proof. How the dirt is able to merge with the dead as if it were an extension of them, as if it were the dead. I wonder if the dirt knows that its dry and cracked skin is and will always be the body’s last blanket. If it knows that its role in this space is to protect the body at its most vulnerable state. If it knows how the body uses it to prove it’s leaving, to be guided into the earth. If it knows how much we need it to hold us in the end.   

There is an unusual cold today. Not an uncomfortable cold or a cold you cannot bear. But the kind of cold that shocks you into life, that forces you to see because you will focus on anything to distract yourself from it. I miss the deer in this kind of cold and wonder if they are not here because of what they’ve seen. I wonder if they too felt they were exploiting the bodies and left. I cannot help but wonder if the dirt has become numb to its job.  

"Today, / after a light rain, / I see it hasn’t bothered / to conceal its seams." 

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The Dirt that Holds Us--Blog Entry #7 Inspired By:

“Dirt”

By Jo McDougall

Its arrogance will break your heart.

Two weeks ago

we had to coax it

into taking her body.

Today,

after a light rain,

I see it hasn’t bothered

to conceal its seams. 

Sifting Through the Dark--Blog Entry #6

Monday, March 4, 2013

7:00pm

28˚F

"Or will the first night be the only night, / a darkness for which we have no other name?"

In the dark nonhuman death happens and we have no proof of it. The trees fall and sway, their husked bodies severing from their emerald birth body. The sky shatters, a window in the cold, all her blue spraying into the smallest shards of glass until only light can mend the pieces back into her. Light weeps into dark, running away and hiding in his holes, in the dark’s black creases. Yes we can hear them; we can hear the natural breaking and bowing—the cries of the trees, the sky, the light. The wind picks up their echoes for us. But we cannot see them; we cannot decipher the exact moment they are taken by the temporary death. We can see the light crawling away into the holes, but we can never catch her in her final act of tucking herself away from the world.

Death is the wrong word for this natural leaving, for this light to dark kind of severing and I am aware of that. Death implies endlessness, but there is no end when light leaves, but only the beginning of dark and then again the beginning of light. “This is where language…stop[s]," where humanity has no words for natural phenomena. Yes we have the scientific, but the natural world wants nothing of theory. The natural world craves for a voice outside of the human, for a voice that can travel beyond sound into actual oral articulation, for a natural voice that can claim its death, its leaving. I wonder if this is possible? Can nature sing? Can we allow it?

Just as we cannot catch the nonhuman entering their temporary dark, we cannot catch the human arriving at their permanent dying. We think we can know the exact moment death is coming. Doctors offer us our chances, give us months as we hope for years, but it has nothing to do with time. It has everything to do with the moment, the moment we cannot control, the dying moment. So many souls at this cemetery did not see that moment coming. My uncle didn’t. He was on the phone with his niece and then he wasn’t. His heart stopped, gave out, walked off and no one saw it coming.    

"How feeble our vocabulary in the face of death,

How impossible to write it down."

At dusk, I arrive at the cemetery to locked gates. The light is leaving me. The dark will not let me in and I respect that. I stand here and stare through his dim body, searching for an end, waiting for my eyes to hit into a kind of spine or bone, but nothing happens. My stare just travels deeper and deeper into him. It moves through the pines that are hardly visible. I can barely make out their stoutness or the way their bodies are marked with the scars that tell their life stories. I reach over the gate and touch the chest of one of the pines to make sure I am not seeing things, to make sure there is a real body standing firm in front of me. The bark is cold and rough and touching its riveted skin makes me that much more human, that much more alive and able to feel through the dark.

This cemetery rises with the sun and falls asleep to the dusk and its human visitors are told to follow the same cycle, but I am breaking it by being here. I wonder what I would do if I were to get caught, if a human would see me in front of this gate. How would I explain myself? Would I say, I am trying to capture death or the moment right before? No not human death, no not death at all really, but more the natural leaving of things.  

"This is where language will stop"

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Sifting Through the Dark--Blog Entry #6 Inspired By:

“The First Night”

By Billy Collins

The worst thing about death must be
   

the first night.
                   

            —Juan Ramón Jiménez

Before I opened you, Jiménez,

it never occurred to me that day and night

would continue to circle each other in the ring of death,

but now you have me wondering

if there will also be a sun and a moon

and will the dead gather to watch them rise and set

then repair, each soul alone,

to some ghastly equivalent of a bed.

Or will the first night be the only night,

a darkness for which we have no other name?

How feeble our vocabulary in the face of death,

How impossible to write it down.

This is where language will stop,

the horse we have ridden all our lives

rearing up at the edge of a dizzying cliff.

The word that was in the beginning

and the word that was made flesh—

those and all the other words will cease.

Even now, reading you on this trellised porch,

how can I describe a sun that will shine after death?

But it is enough to frighten me

into paying more attention to the world’s day-moon,

to sunlight bright on water

or fragmented in a grove of trees,

and to look more closely here at these small leaves,

these sentinel thorns,

whose employment it is to guard the rose.