"You are the baby bird"

binding and rending

I’ve wanted to sit down and write for days and weeks, for years, maybe. Definitely, for years. I’m now behind for years. So, maybe I’ll just tell you this story about a walk the other day, a rage walk, a walk I took with my ancestors, the ladies who wear veils and black dresses who carry rosaries in their blunt tipped fingers their strong arms round, no muscle, yet can lift pots of tomato sauce, move grown people whose legs dangle useless who seize and jerk and drool who urge food on those they love who walk in grief and walk rending garments walk wailing, one of those kinds of walks. I walked with my ancestors and they are all women and we are all enraged. The judge rendered his decision and it was a good decision on the one hand but on the other it is nothing but loss and more loss and one day I will write of the folly that is marriage and the folly that is divorce and the greatest folly of all, the State and the Courts and the Lawyers that will bind and then rend the bonds between men and women and maybe men and men and perhaps women and women but I like to think not I like to think not. Afterward, I walked around and around wailing with my ancestors and wailing with Sandra my friend who cares for her child in the way I care for mine whose heart had recently failed her in the physical sense (how scary how expected) and when she said how are you? I burst into tears the tears of rage I was walking walking off the bougainvillea pink the sidewalk sizzled the sky broke blue and a crow flew by and dropped a dying bird at my feet in that instant and I screamed and Sandra said, What? What is it? And I said A Crow! A crow has dropped a baby bird at my feet and it is dying! I showed her over the telephone wires, the crow perched in a nearby tree squawking its terrible squawk (I hate them I hate crows) the baby bird a fetus really no feathers skin and bone just hatched and plucked from a nest its beak opening and closing gasping I guess and it was a terrible sight. My ancestor might have crushed it under her boot. Put it out of its misery. Stopped the suffering. I watched it die begging for metaphor and put it here on this page.

Later, days later, The Therapist said You, you are the baby bird.