No one told me I would reach an age in which I seek out birds, finding joy in gold dust finches, ruby throated hummingbirds nasty on the feeder, fighting with their own— and that we would lean our bellies into the cold kitchen counters watching them peck or sip or eat or steal thistle seed we put out for one kind of bird, but another takes. Not the long gone great auk with my grandfather’s estuary eyes but those still with us: jays and cardinals crested like rival baseball teams, kingfishers stoic in the eye but desperate in the stomach, the way I crave coffee most the night before, thinking ahead to morning when I will go through the routine I have made for myself, structured as a nest and just as comforting, as these birds flit around me as though they are my thoughts or my husband’s as though we found them in the yard after all this time when of course they were there before or were drawn in by the array of feeders, by suet and seeds we set out for them, desperate as we are now that our children are in and out by foot or car or sheer emotional distance which is, too, what the birds bring— winging beauty and impermanence just by being birds and I wish someone had explained this to me that I would reach the age in which I notice birds, in which instead of hearing their song, I am calling them home.
I am learning to gather seeds—garlic chives, marigolds both vanilla and pylon orange, coneflowers proudly bald after I pluck each slim black-tipped seed and keep them labeled in an envelope to dry and I am reminded of my grandmother who with her knees in the dirt told me gardening is the truest form of hope which swells my empty body as I gather these although she will not see and would have looked at my penmanship and sighed because she found hope & errors everywhere which kept her present, focused as the animals that prowled her garden & once took up residence in the driver’s seat of her car where sunflower seeds had spilled, forming neat rows in the seat seams as though she had planted them and because the animals— chipmunks, maybe—seemed so comfortable she allowed them run of them place until they’d raised their young walking instead of driving which she told me was good for her and for the animals who left without warning and whose presence I think she missed, though she smiled and began driving again, hopeful they would come back each season as though they’d all made a pact— and she would not urge them elsewhere if they promised to clean up what she’d spilled and I am asking the same of the dirt today, to hold what I’m taking and make it useful.
Emily Franklin has been published in The New York Times, The London Sunday Times, Guernica, The Cincinnati Review, New Ohio Review, Hobart, Blackbird, The Rumpus, Epoch, River Styx, and The Journal among other places as well as featured on National Public Radio, and named notable by the Association of Jewish Libraries. Her debut poetry collection TELL ME HOW YOU GOT HERE was published by Terrapin Books in February 2021.
Illustrations of various patents printed in “Cycling Art, Energy, and Locomotion: A Series of Remarks on the Development of Bicycles, Tricycles, and Man-Motor Carriages” by Robert Pittis Scott (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1889). From Public Domain Review.
