little bird

I’ll admit I haven’t given it my all. I haven’t even hit the books, ordered by silhouette, revealed in color photographs whose colors I don’t always see. The little bird in the city tree late in the afternoon, flitting from branch to branch, browsing deftly in the late season greenery you get after a California storm. The dusty deadfall yard at once lush and verdant, the brown shrubs and drought starved dirt alive with the kiss of rain. It looks almost like a wren, it moves not unlike the red breasted nuthatches I see patrolling the pines. I couldn’t tell you anything about its colors, as is my constant cross. 

I missed a lot of acts I loved, always broke and with a pronounced aversion to crowds, I never was much one for making any given scene. At 16 I saw Wall of Voodoo, Divinyls, Missing Persons, and the English Beat, but was sick in my car with sunstroke when the Clash went on. Laurie Anderson, my first big art crush, canceled a show I had tickets to in San Francisco. I saw Tom Waits during the show that became the concert film Big Time, despite a prophetic dream that came true during his performance. Shane MacGowan ditched me twice, his own adventures leading to cancellations nearly a decade apart. The second time he slipped me was at a Guinness Fleadh where I managed to catch both John Prine and Elvis Costello, so it didn’t sting nearly so much. There are acts of love in the witness, the attention owed to the beauty that touches your heart. The list of sins and infractions always greatest in omission.

Dusk has come, and like my father while he lived, I smoke as the evening arises. I live in my father’s house, stare across this devastated legacy while I wait for unseen stars to bear out their constellations. I care for my mother as she sinks into further dementia and senescence while the foundation cracks and the firmament reveals its less discrete portents. Life goes on as this branching withers away, our devotions only carried on haphazardly as the earth receives its own. A devotee of the open stance I take what comes, everything coming down to where to put my hands and feet, the rest too great and reckless to reckon. A little bird, at work in the world, the open yard spitting green as the leaves decide their fate. Last words buried deep in the turn of the soil, this witness among the words unasked as life strives past my days. This witness all I have to offer to the end.