Thursday, February 28, 2019

Compensation



The black birch was dying from the top down,
so many branches having already been removed
for safety that the goldfinches no longer came
in the fall to hang upside down and harvest seeds.
Still, the sparrows went to work on a hole in the tree,
gradually widening it to nest size, and I watched
several sets of hatchlings, all bald heads and gaping
beaks, at first, then perching for a week or two
like puffy dauphins on the fence, and then gone.
One year the chickadees were first to the hole,
defending it, making it more spacious still. Other
bird couples came and went, each doing a bit
of remodeling, as you do, upgrading to stainless
steel appliances, maybe, or marble tile. It was as if
they couldn’t help picking away at it, like your old
aunt who knits as obsessively as she once smoked,
filling whole rooms with afghans, slippers, hats.
Each tenant planed away at the walls, until one day
they punched clean through cambium laths
and drywall bark, leaving the home open to wind
now that would chill the eggs. The nest lay vacant
for years, the hole like a periscope eye in the stump,
until one summer when wasp masons began
bricking up the walls, mixing saliva into stucco,
subdividing, leasing studio apartments, a vibrant
compensatory hum for the slowing xylem and phloem.

Published in Broad Street, 2019