Some Birds

Sometimes there’s a woodpecker on the roof stabbing the gutter who knows how any times. It’s a heavy metal mating song, territorial love poem. And maybe she hears him, that girl bird in the purple coffee tree. She takes the B-line Express air current, makes a left at the mango tree to the condominium’s southeast corner. I think a day is a very long time for a bird. Sunlight goes on and on, and clouds, well, birds never see clouds, do they. There’s nothing much beneath their wings, except air. And they love to leave their feathers on the ground. It’s always the same feather. And when I find it I take it home, which is just over here, up these stairs to this door. I’ve lived behind this door for more than twenty years. I look out the back from the lanai, and watch the Gentleman Pruner come out to put his hands on the daffodils, like Margaret does, moving them slantwise here and there because maybe they’re supposed to pick up radio waves. Just ask a bee. Anyway, the girl woodpecker has gone to her lover, and he’s stopped making that awful racket. They’re doing it right now on the roof in broad daylight, in front of the lizards and starlings and squirrels, and in front of Mrs. Dandridge in her big white hat. They’re making little woodpeckers.

A Particular Point in Passing

The building held no significance. Just a white glance as you drove by. You don’t remember where you were going in that little white car, repossessed days after the bank took your house, after you lost your job, a fews days before your father died. But this is many years later, and for some reason that building comes into your head. You imagine offices on the fourth floor. Desks, cubicles, Heckle and Jeckle calendar in the break room where somebody was eating a sandwich. Somebody at the copier, somebody in the ladies room, someone called to the supervisor’s office, the one with the big glass clock or so you imagine. Shut the door, the boss might have said. The air came on and off. Phones rang. The UPS guy handed the receptionist a package, a potted palm blocking a photo of Tippi Hedren. A country and western song on the radio. Maybe a woman stood at a window looking down to the highway, saw your car going by, wondered who might be driving. You think of things like that. All these years later that woman is tapping a pen against her lips. She’s writing a novel, trying to find a way to bring two lonely strangers together. She’s certain you’re one of them.