Into the blue

Posted on | February 8, 2009 | 7 Comments

It’s all going by so quickly now. I remember the day last spring when Lila and I found this egg in the grass and brought it inside so we could look at it whenever we wanted to feel that remarkable blue. Feel it? There’s a little bit left.

Decades ago when I found my first Robin’s egg, there was a baby bird inside. It lay at the base of the pear tree in our back yard, cracked in half, feathers, feet and beak glistening in the sun. It was the most potent symbol of lost potential I had ever seen. I sat on the grass next to it, watching that still blue, listening to the breeze and the rustling young leaves, waiting for some zing of truth to strike me like lightning. There was only the green, the blue, the glisten, the rustle. The question.

Death seemed so romantic. Something from which we could recover if we maybe left a big enough mark. I got it (in the abstract) that death is what happens. But here is what I understand so far: life is what happens while we’re busy worrying about living well enough to cheat death. I don’t understand very much at all.

I’ve touched dead people’s cold, empty hands — dry like paper, heavy and light at the same time. Dead chicken. Dead cat. Dead frog. All stiff and immovable. Watched a dog let go after being hit by a car, the breath a struggle and fight to a surface that was disappearing before us. Held in my palm the still-warm fetus my body rejected, malformed and impossible, its tiny curved spine like a bright, toothy smile embedded in dark tissue. Stared into dead eyes that reflected nothing and took nothing in, sometimes even belonging to someone physically alive.

These experiences have informed some shadow racing along in the background of my journey, and the knowledge that, like all of us, I’m inch by inch closer to being…what? Gone. Beyond. Up high. Down low. The past. The future. Inside out of the now. A set of engraved letters and numbers on a carved stone. An ache in someone’s heart. A breath on the wind. A story to tell. What? And where? Then, when? And the question that numbs me the most: how?

The ground is too frozen to dig a proper hole to bury Charles. I keep looking out the window at the cage and thinking of her bunny body beginning to decompose because it was warmer yesterday and today. Perhaps I should start a small fire, and burn the cage with her in it. But the wood is soaked. I may have to move her with a shovel now, which feels cumbersome and awkward and not a little disrespectful. I should bring her body out to the field as a gift to the neighborhood carrion.

I want to have big words to lead me into that place, and symbols with eons of meaning behind them, but for now I can’t get these words off the page: we’re all artifacts, I think.

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This post is a contribution to the 52 Stories flickr group week 2.

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