The Look

Most reviews of "Winged Migration" -- a hyper-beautiful documentary about birds -- proclaimed triumphantly that this film will make you feel like you're flying, and it is true. The camera work and the sheer closeness to the hundreds of various feathery subjects as they are suspended or gliding in the air above stupendously different landscapes shoots you out of your seat into a thin atmosphere of ethereal possibilities, and you forget you're not one of them. After two hours, the credits administer a couple of end-of-the-movie slaps, and you hit the ground with a thud.

What I remember the most, though, is one of the last scenes. Early in the morning, migratory geese are coming back to France after the winter spent in warmer zones; an old woman with a blue handkerchief on her head and a woollen cardigan goes out into the field and stretches out her hand, offering bread to the birds in a gesture of welcome; they stand like that for a minute, looking at each other, and then the birds come. Pure inter-species communication, based on offering, good will and trust.

I was reminded of this sort of offering the other day, during a break in a mountain hike. While we were eating on a rock close to the summit, a gray beady-eye bird showed up in the pine tree close to me. I had bread in my hand, and must have made an unconscious outbound movement since the bird took it as an invitation and flew towards me; then, realizing the piece of bread wasn't actually meant for it, it braked in mid-air, turned around, and went back to the tree. I immediately outstretched my hand as far as it would go, this time making a proper offering unambiguously. Just before it ventured again and alighted on my palm (the touch of its fine claws was lighter than a silky spiderweb aired in the winds), we looked at each other. It was one of those heartbeat-long looks you don't forget because it is everything, it is yes, it is a wordless tuning in with the universe.

Annie Dillard wrote about meeting a beaver while she was roaming in the woods one day. She just happened to pass by and look at it at the same moment when it looked at her. And there they were, for a precious finiteness of time, two beings gazing honestly at each other, with full consciousness, acknowledging the presence of the other, filling the moment of overlap with their complicit mutuality. A tiny and temporary redemption of the dark side of existentialism.

Looking at that bird and seeing in its eyes that it will come to my hand a second before it did, made my day, every day.

Bisou

One afternoon, Muriel across the street decided to put her 3-year old cat down.

Ma Bisou n'est pas fine,
she says and blinks.
Elle crache et elle est
jalouse -- with a note of
civilized frustration in
her voice: je m'en
débarrasse.


She waits a moment
on the other side of the fence,
the pet-carrier in her hand
(is she waiting for
approval? sympathy?
condemnation?), then
walks briskly away.


Mouth full of silence,
unchewed thoughts,
and an urge to run,
run down the alley,
run faster than the few
seconds left to save
what's left of Bisou's


feline life, revert the
absurdist sketch into
a mini happy-ending,
laugh at the foiled
attempt at useless
murder -- instead,
the silence continues


as the sound of steps
in the alley dies down.
Inaction on a small
scale, and days on
end to wonder if
this awkwardness
was just a random whim

or a symptom of a much bigger
thing.

A few days before: if you look hard, you'll see the white-gray speck of Bisou in the centre

Distortions of Renaissance Pragmatism

The world must be peopled,
Says Benedick (to himself)
Before Beatrice enters
(Act II, Scene iii).

And so I do -- without much
ado. Except, I don't
people it with people,
really. A friend called it

Slavic animism once
(it was the summer of
bare feet, long words
and short nights).

What it is, actually,
is an exercise in
exploding loneliness
into a population of animas,

protective and personalized,
sending signals and
reasserting the rightness
of this moment in this

your life, reflecting
your defragmented
you, showing it
in the light.

A comforting mirage
of external meaning
revealed in the
quotidian to the observant --


this is certainly
not what Benedick
had in mind when he
set to people the world


with Beatrice. Too
metaphysical, that.
And, ultimately,
profoundly lonely.

Black Sandals

If my mother had been Asian,
She would have probably looked
Like the woman on the metro
A few weeks ago.
It was something in her
Wide temples, it was
Her short black hair,
Her small, clever hands, and
The intelligent fingers
With modestly long
Fingernails, but most of all,


It was the straps of her
Black sandals around her
Dainty pale-skin ankles
Set off nicely by medium-
High heels that spelled
My mother silently
From the floor of the
Metro car.