2005-06-20
burials
sigh de sigh. I am tired, and I am drunk, and I must awaken at 8:30am, and it is 10 to 2am. sigh mcsighalot.
but. I buried a baby bird in my garden today! how sad I felt.
making the requisite june phone call to dear papa, I was transplanting houseplants (outside, for tidiness) at the same time. I turned, and gasped, thinking there was a mouse - then, a dead baby mouse - lying there in the dirt, and then I realized it was a tiny bony bird corpse, shoved out of the nest on the balcony above.
so sad I was!!
later in the early evening, after deliberating and deciding that no no no I could not simply shovel it into a plastic sack and drop it into a corner trash can, I dug a deep little hole. Then I carefully scooped up the little guy with my trowel. Of course, I had to take a closer look.
So fragile and featherless, and curled up, naked, closed eyes, floppy headed and dead. My hand involuntarily shook and the body rolled over. I saw the blue legs and soft claws clenched up the the belly, and the neck lolling from side to side with no muscles.
I wanted to place it gently into the ground, but my trowel slanted too quickly and I'm afraid it landed face first in the hole, tiny head squashed without solemnity up against its body. Neck cranked at an inappropriate angle. I piled dirt onto the body, feeling quite sick and sad.
***
Later, my friend came to visit. He is wonderful and wonderfully intelligent - sharp and troubled and angry and paranoid.
His father recently exited the closet and his parents' marriage is dissolving. When he goes home, it is not home, anymore. It is, as he said, "chaotic".
We sat outside and drank beer -- smoked cigarettes and talked about politics. Well, I finally admitted that I don't think / know about politics, I only think about people and how they are becoming less human toward each other. And that I find that sad and that, as well as the sadness, largely the trouble.
And I asked him, briefly - not my business - about his family. He rambled on, frantically and violently, about it in shallow terms for a few minutes. Then took a giant swallow of beer, with two hands, put the bottle back on the table, and changed the topic.
Two sad dangly dropped down birds I found today, it seems.
pansycline at 1:49 a.m.