Unseasonably warm on this 26th of April, 86° in the shade, giving new meaning to “the cruelest month” moniker, and I’m biking home from work, still in work clothes, feeling myself try to crawl out of them, the sun beating down on my back as I pedal home. It’s a short ride, but long enough. My heart beats a little faster than it normally does as I pedal into the drive. I put the bike away, drink a tall glass of sparkling water with a tinge of lemon and let the dogs outside. They run in circles, bite at each other, eat sticks and clods, dig holes in the rich spring dirt, bark at nothing. She sends me a text: a picture of these blue bird feathers she found today in the sawdust, a poetry prompt, she said. Spring time carnage. I’d forgotten to tell her about yesterday’s discovery in the gravel driveway: a decapitated bird head, covered with flies, still attached to a spine four or five inches long. Nothing else left. I didn’t take a picture of that. Too small to smell the rot, but as I scoop it up with the shovel, a memory of the smell of animal death visits briefly, and I toss the thing unceremoniously into the trash. It’s difficult and kind of terrifying to imagine what must have happened while no one was looking. A neighborhood cat maybe, or those damn crows, too smart for their own good, they say. Everything blooms. Everything dies. Look at these bluebells cropping up like weeds, these pink things, these sweet, spicy lilac flowers. Smell the sawdust in your fingers as you pick through in your gloves to remove the dead bird feathers. And today, and yesterday, Wordsworth and Shelley both sang “Mutability” to my 10th graders. They understood.
michael jarmer 