November 2: All Soul’s Day

Two crows lift off

something dead on the roadside—

is this transmigration?

July 15: In memory

Memorial service.

A dog outside

barking relentlessly.

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February 19: CSI: Mount Battie

Alarm calls of songbirds,
downy feathers drifting—
hunger satisfied.

April 27: Found object

Spring migration.

The boy takes the dead thrush

to school in a paper bag.

 

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January 27: Passing

Dooryard full of cars--

yesterday a man died here.

I pass by slowly.

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January 9: Impermanence

Stopped in a Tibetan market tucked inside St. Paul's Episcopal Church and bought from a Buddhist monk a bracelet made of turquoise skull beads. The helpful enclosure reads: "Buddhists incorporated skull images into bracelet to represent the impermanence of life and the limits of human knowledge. Skull-shaped bracelet beads help chanters reflect upon the inevitability of death and the necessity of embracing lives filled with compassion."

We pondered death further on a walk amid the white crypts and statuary of Key West Cemetery: all those above-ground tombs, and also, quite surprising to us, many very large reptiles crawling around the kingdom of the dead as if they owned it.

Tibetan skull beads.

Walk through the cemetery

startled by iguanas.

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March 21: Dead Red-tail

Boys call it an owl.

Dead hawk's talons are curled tight

as if against cold.

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September 11: Vultures

Twelve soaring vultures--
celebrating thermals
or something dead below.

August 17: Loss

Wake from a nightmare--

I almost lose my mother.

Young crow calls all day.

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May 7: Mortality

A friend recently lost her father. While a death is almost always hard to take, it seems especially difficult to deal with when the whole world around you is so blatantly coming back to life.

So hard--
planning a funeral
while tulips are budding.

November 2: Day of the Dead

Over the highway
seven soaring vultures--
what's below them unseen.

June 11: Shrew

We came home last night to find a dead rodent deposited in the middle of our front lawn. Perhaps it was meant as a gift to our cat, an indoor cat who tries her best to interact through the window with all the neighborhood cats--as well as birds, bugs, etc.--outside.

We looked it up in our mammal field guide: Short-tailed Shrew. I picked it up by its short tail and gently laid it under the ferns at the edge of the lawn, for it to hopefully be found and carried off in the night. The field guide tells us that this shrew has a poisonous bite, a surprising defense for such a minuscule creature.

Intact but dead shrew--
sacrifice for the cat gods,
those merciless ones?

June 8: Thinking about a friend who's dying

After the rain stopped
cardinal flew through the yard
and back again.

May 27: Dead bird

Some migrating birds get this far in their journey and still don't make it. Today a dead kingbird was found on a beach. We could tell by its prominent breastbone, sharp through its soft feathers, that the bird had completely depleted its fat stores. It had flown thousands of miles from South America this spring, only to starve in the fog on a small Maine island.

The kingbird wasn't the only dead bird found. But the other casualties, a Canada Warbler and two yellowthroats found in the middle of a trail, were victims of cats--a fate somehow even more tragic than simple depletion and exhaustion.

Dead kingbird in hand--
sad discovery of sharp bones,
hidden red crown.

November 11: Moth

To make the most of yesterday's sunlight and relative warmth, and hopefully find some interesting birds (winter finches are arriving all over Maine now), I spent a couple of hours walking around my neighborhood, binoculars around my neck. I ended my outing in the cemetery just a couple of blocks away from home at the base of Mount Battie. The sinking sun cast a pink glow on the craggy west-facing talus slope of Mount Battie and gave added definition to the headstones.

I've always enjoyed walking around cemeteries--for the quiet, for the glimpse into a community's history, for the variety of inscriptions and engravings on the stones. Cemeteries are poignant places, orderly reminders of the ever-present fact of mortality. This cemetery in particular has meaning for me because some of my own family are buried here: my grandfather, great-grandparents, and a great-uncle.   

So it was in a pensive state of mind that I wandered the neat rows of headstones as the shadows lengthened. I paused in front of one old stone to read a moving inscription, something along the lines of, "Here all our hopes lie lost." That's when something weird happened. A little brown moth fluttered by. As I wondered if it might be one of those winter species that tolerates cold weather, it headed right toward me and fluttered against my lips. It fluttered there for so long, several seconds, that I eventually had to brush it away. 

Kissed by a moth. In a cemetery. Hard not to read some deeper meaning into that--a visitation from a soul wandering loose among the stones, some sort of reminder to cultivate silence... But the rational side of my brain wants to tell me that the moth was undoubtedly just drawn to something mundane like the heat of my breath or the carbon dioxide of my exhalations. 

Moth's fluttery kiss--

a restless spirit

or my honey lip balm?

Postscript: Poetic license aside, I wasn't actually wearing any lip balm...

November 8: Wind and sorrow

For the third time in a year I attended a memorial service for a someone I knew and admired--all three vital men taken in their prime, each a role model for the way one should live a life--energetic, joyful, generous forces within this community. At today's service, folk musician Gordon Bok and his wife, harpist Carol Rohl, performed Gordon's song, "Isle au Haut Lullaby," some particular phrases of which really resonated for me:

Give sadness to the stars
And sorrow to the seas...

Sleep now, the moon is high,
And the wind blows cold;
For you are sad and young
And the sea is old.

Bleak but oddly comforting images as the wind roars outside, whipping branches in the near-dark, and not far away, the cold waters of Penobscot Bay stretch to the horizon with their burden of islands, an ocean deep enough to swallow any grief.

The widow said she felt like
last night's storm was carrying
her husband away from her.

October 15: Spray of sparrows

Sparrows still linger in the fields and along the roadside. As I was driving today, sparrows scattered on either side of my car, their plumage blending perfectly with the sepias, ochres, and umbers of the weedy verge. They're subtly gathering the season's last fruits, the seeds of withering grasses and wildflowers. How close, this time of year, the convergence of beauty and mortality.  

As my car passes, 

spray of late-season sparrows. 

A friend's mother has died.

April 1: Dead blackbird

A friend tells me today how, walking on a beach in February, she and her husband came across a dead red-winged blackbird. The bird was untouched, a male, black with bright red and yellow feathers on its wings like epaulettes. He was heading north early, hoping to get to the best territory ahead of the others--but he seems to have made the journey a little too soon. He probably froze to death, dropping out of the sky from cold and exhaustion, one of the harsh statistics of migration. He may have flown all the way from South America before he landed on that beach in New Hampshire.

Some impulse made my friend want to keep the bird's body, rather than just tossing it back into the waves. So she brought it home, five hours away, and tucked it in her freezer between the peas and the shrimp. She doesn't know what to do with it now. She's not even legally supposed to have a blackbird in her freezer; the Migratory Bird Act prohibits owning even a single feather of a migratory bird, though most of us do. I think she wrote a poem about it. She might donate it to a nearby college's biology program. Or give it an elaborate burial.

No meal left for gulls,
the blackbird's body, preserved,
becomes a relic.

October 5: Leaf

A moment of beauty amid the mundane: I've just parked my car in downtown Camden, and I'm scooting around to the passenger side door so I can get out my registration and insurance card to register my car at the town office across the street. As I open the door, I notice a single, perfect, bright yellow leaf on the sidewalk,  a composite of five leaflets on one twig. The parent tree, an ash, immediately recognizable by its straight, grooved trunk, shades the village green. It's probably been there for a century or so. The leaf I find is the only yellow one visible, the only one fallen--the rest of the foliage in sight is still green and on the boughs. So I pick up the leaf offering and stash it on the front seat. Later, when I'm done with my errands and back in the car, the sight of it makes me smile.

Why this leaf fallen
when the park is still so green?
Hint of things to come...

In light of this moment and then the news tonight of the death of Steve Jobs, 56, founder of Apple, I got to thinking about mortality. A dear friend unexpectedly passed away a couple of weeks ago (he was barely older than Steve Jobs), and this quotation attributed to Steve Jobs that was going around Facebook tonight spoke to me like that single ash leaf:
‎"No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose." - Steve Jobs in 2005 after being diagnosed with cancer

September 16: Safe

On my short drive into town after work this evening, a squirrel dashed across the street just ahead of the tires on an oncoming truck. Although my car was some distance away when I observed this, I still instinctively braked as I watched the sequence of events unfold--sort of bracing myself for the possibility of a small disaster that never happened. On my way back home from the library, a chipmunk, tail held high, made its mad dash from one side of the street to the other. Safe, thankfully, and nowhere near my car.

I've noticed more than the usual amount of road-kill the past few weeks--squirrels, mostly, and some raccoons and skunks. I wonder if it's because the summer's young are grown and dispersing from their home territories, so more animals than usual (and more naive animals) are wandering around,  unknowingly putting themselves in front of our cars. In any case, it's always a relief to witness a safe crossing--one less life lost in a day.

Without knowing it
we too probably miss death
by seconds some days.