The Birds Know Better

I awoke to the song of the Swainson’s Thrush.

That musical tinkering that sounds like a baseball rupturing your neighbor’s window, but instead of the glass falling to the living room carpet, it rises, up and up, like a thousand translucent, trumpeting angels.

I was over-hot in my tent, and felt stiff and groggy.

Heavy eyelids and blurry vision made me feel like someone had placed a fishbowl over my head that somehow still held its water.

It’s hard to imagine a songbird waking hours after the sun only to turn over, take one bleary-eyed look at the world, pull a pillow over its face, and try to postpone life just a few more hours.

No, the birds know better.

And as each stitch of this star-drenched blanket is pulled up, revealing a world baked into slanted gold, the birds begin their day with a song, like angels within angels, knowing that to postpone life even a few hours, could mean postponing it forever.

July 2007
Marble Mountains, California