idleness and augury no. 4
[No. 1] [No. 2] [No. 3]
I wake to knocking at the window. Turning over in bed, I see a robin glaring at me from the far side of the sill. On the window is a history of knocking: a large round smudge made of smaller ones, scratches and blurs from talon and beak, a record of its flailing against the pane.
Half-asleep, I do not think of April, of the probable nest and its new, paleblue eggs. Half-asleep, I do not think that the bird must be attacking its reflection. No. Half-asleep, my first thought is that it wants to come in. My second thought is that someone must have trained this bird to wake them up. The robin flits back to its tree. I plummet back into sleep. Until the robin wakes me, I dream of robins.
And wake me it does, again and again, from six until nine in the morning. I fall back asleep, it attacks the window, I wake, and we regard each other through the widening blur of its delusions. The knocking is not a beaklike tapping but a loud, scattered clunking. It is April in Upstate New York, but it sounds like the walnuts that fell on the roof, forever ago, in September in the South.
I dreaded that first Robin, so, begins one of Emily Dickinson’s poems. The robin is the harbinger of spring’s bright doom, the procession of seasons that one will never get used to and can never stop. I do not dread the robins but suffer similar delusions:
I thought If I could only live
Till that first Shout got by —
Not all Pianos in the Woods
Had power to mangle me —
One robin I dream of is mangled, smashed against the pane but still alive. Radial and many-winged, like a starfish or a seraph. Perhaps I am dreaming the robin and its window-work into one unnatural thing. All things seem as messengers to the cracked-open mind. I had had a very bad week.
The next morning I woke at the same time. But not to knocking. The bird was not there. I woke to the thought of it, perhaps the hope of it. If I could only live. The pane was silent all morning and silent all the next. I could only squint through the scratchmarks of that agitated splatterwork in the center of the pane.
Guarding its skyblue future against the threat of the thought of itself, the robin marks its anguish, writes its poem. I am struggling to write mine. I guess I kept waking to see if it was there, on that second silent morning, because I had decided, after all, to let it in.
ben tapeworm