Homeboy at Home During Coronavirus

October 7, 2020: Coyote Hollow, Thetford Center, VT

6:36 a.m. 54 degrees, wind SSE 2 mph. Sky: waning moon overhead, brightly embedded in empty immaculately blue; clouds rim the horizon, dusky before the sun, whitening as dawn bends toward the sunrise, then spreading to the zenith; veiled moon fades and sinks by the time I return home. Permanent streams: whisper. Wetlands: overflows with the rapid-fire voice of the red-shouldered hawk; less so with mist, thin and low, a subtle earthy exhalation. Pond: lonesome whirligig beetle scoots on the surface, swirling the inverted reflection of three airborne crows that land in a zigzagging pine; an image in turmoil, an upside-down world . . . the implications and analogies, endless. 

Season of the sparrow, the whole mishpocha: song in the raspberries and the hydrangea; Lincoln along the edge of the road; white-throated everywhere; white-crowned under the feeder; fox in the lilacs, dull reddish tail in motion; swamp in the alders; junco in the woods. A seedy landscape in the very best sense of the word.

Birds eating invasive fruit, sowing invasive seeds: whited-throated sparrow gorges on honeysuckle berries, bits of red around the white throat, and yellow lores; robin gorges on blue-black buckthorn berries. Together, unwittingly reshuffle Earth’s biota. An accomodating array of forbidden fruit. I want the birds to find something native to eat: a face-puckering wild grape, or a frost-softened crabapple. Maybe, a sumac berry, dried and fuzzy, like a webworm. I fall short of convincing sparrow and robin, both of whom keep their own council. Even with the pandemic and the President (a pandemic himself, a phantasmagoria of horror and conceit), I still have trouble dismissing the thought of noxious, alien plants spread by cheerful songbirds. In a discordant world, even the woodland edge struggles.