Persicasanct, Avis Verba, and Lupusion

I. Persicasanct 

The preacher came through after the fires. After the floods, it was the shrink. After the mudslides, the theatre troupe. Beginning when I was fifteen, a series of disaster after disaster ravaged the small valley I come from. The small valley I still inhabit now. Drought, plague, pestilence. Quakes, sinkholes, storms. In the aftermath of each catastrophe, a new kind of prophet emerged; we weren’t sure from where. We never asked, they never offered. We suspected that they, too, were survivors of their own personal apocalypses. Only thrice were they people. Most often, they were birds, one common sparrow in particular. An occasional hare or doe. Once, a wolf.

The pastor brought us a nondescript god who blamed us for the flames that took our timber homes. God has brought this pain upon you because you deserve it. The shrink wanted us to blame each other, too, but in a different way. You are the god who begets their own destruction. The theatre troupe, scant as we were, shared with us a few strips of unidentified dried meat. We sent them off with a little bread. At the time, we grew enough wheat to make a few loaves a month. By then, there weren’t so many mouths to feed in the small valley, anyway. The few of us left are still deciphering the dispatches from the world at work.

Orchards took up most of the small valley. I grew up knowing that they were more than a means to our material survival. The spiral of fruit trees was spiritual, sacred, both of and not of the same world we were. At the center of the spiral, the consecrated core, was the Sycamore colossus, visible from the surrounding peaks; visible, I liked to imagine, from outer space.

Though it’s been half a century, I still remember the obscenity of sinking my teeth into a ripe peach. I could only eat them alone, so aware was I of the juice flooding down my chin, my sticky hands cupping the globe of flesh, the involuntary moans I made with each fresh bite. How it softened, sunk under my fingertips. It was like eating the light of September’s long, sappy, golden hours. Every salivating mouthful a portal, an eagerly anticipated first kiss; unsure but steady, a pleasant pressure. It took me whole afternoons to finish one peach, so slowly did I eat them.

If the preacher had come around then I would have told him to get lost. I would have told him that those peaches were my god and that my path to salvation is laid by the savior. I would have told the shrink that, too. I’d have sent a few baskets down the road with the players. I would’ve taught them how to dry and crack the pit to reach the seed, how to look for the small sprout that meant it was ready to be planted. And then you just toss it, I’d tell them. And maybe someone, generations later, will come across a peach tree just exactly when they need to. Maybe, somewhere, the soil is still able. 

II. Avis Verba

A bird’s heart can break as clean and quick as any other creature’s, it just happens at a higher elevation. And when a bird’s heart breaks, it breaks ancestrally. Not so long ago, I could circle the arbor spiral in the small valley, tilted in, my body a forty-five-degree angle from the horizon. Right wing rising, left leant into the spin. I could follow, without fear, my instinct towards centripetal choreography. Now, I see the pocked puncture wound where the Sycamore colossus once towered, housing generations upon generations of nests. I saw the heat that took it, too. Took my mate. Our eggs. Later, from the sawtooth peaks surrounding the small valley, I saw a sinkhole swallow what was left of the charred stump. 

The wind tickles my underbelly wingspan, all outstretched. I call it forth by name, catch it just beneath my slick inner feathers. We lock-in and laugh, delighted, in a state of nothing except together. I fly fast above the landlocked, frictionless and flowing full of freedom. I know they can’t see, through no fault of their own, the bursts of the world’s breath as I do. They can’t see my blue. Still, I see theirs.

I do not envy the pedaled, no matter how many sturdy legs stand between them. Those who walk on two, those who trundle or glide on four, the ones who scurry on eight or crawl around on a thousand, they are all so stunted and stumbling. So lost in their limited point of view. Up a place inaccessible. I don’t quite pity them either, the way their terrestrial tethers trick them. They think it saves them, being grounded. They think the sky is an impossibility, a dwelling solely for dreams, insurmountably distant. My feelings for them belong to the terrible visions that oft overtake me, deep in the cold sunless span of time and place where east and west mix, where my wings fail my will. Where the moon sets permanently, never to be seen again. Where I become trapped in terrain, exiled indefinitely from home, from my aerial territory.

Though I neither envy nor pity them, I do, admittedly, love them. As I love any creature who eats and sleeps, whose every atom strives towards living, whose cells split, sometimes maliciously, as mine do. This is why I try to tell them, the upright two-footed featherless. It touches something in me, how young they are as a species. I, for several season cycles, along with the flesh, ate the rough stones from the center of their smallest sacred fruits. I passed them in the shape of a path, the one clear way I could see for them to continue after such prolonged, complex catastrophes. 

A ways away, on the other side of their easternmost mountain, past the spine of peaks that gradually shrinks into a long-abandoned tailbone, a trail of sapling peach trees would lead them to a large grassland.  It took me most of my adolescence to find it and the rest of my adulthood to form it. A prairie, where wheat still grows, and their precious ground is stable, safe from every kind of fault line. It would be a terrible journey for them, with so much unkind ground to cover and as clumsy as they’d cover it. But they could grow there. Grow in a way made impossible by flame, flood, and famine. They haven’t found it yet, and there are so few of them now, I worry they never will.  They can’t see my way. Still, I see theirs.

III. Lupusion  

Sunrise. First of us awake. Snout around in sister’s chest, lick the top of brother’s head, unspool from warm-limbed tangle, heap of fur and breath and kin, contented. Enslumbered. Inhale wide as sky. Stretch. Foreleg extension, hips fold in and up and back, easy sockets encircling joints. Spine enlengthens. Exhale slow as dawn oncoming. Ribcage cartilage hinges. Blood pounds against bone, upon tympanic membrane, drum taut and beating. Inhale. Tighten shoulder blades to almost touch. Tense neck. Exhale. Muscle melt. Nod. Pleasure. 

Trot, pause, sniff, piss, trot. Trot, trot, trot. Pause. Sniff ground: former glacier, long-gone sea sediment still scenting, snowshoe hare den nearby, decomposing chipmunk pup beneath damp aspen leaf, owl droppings, mushroom musk. Life. Nod. It smells of Life. Stare out. Amongst illumination newly spilling between trunks. East, to elevated ridge’s edge and origin of day. Stare in. Sniff air: conifer bark, overripe peach flesh one day away from rot, distant smoke, clean snow coming South, so soft along nostril, first of the season. North. Nod. It smells of North. 

Trot on towards…where to? Back to pack? No. Further from. Trot, trot, trot. Pause. Listen: windscrape through pine needles, miniscule groans of growth from root and leaf alike, though quieter than yesterday. Still, a thousand thousand little slitherlings, crunchlings, scratchlings, clawlings, clamoring over and into and through each other. West, to water. Trot to stream, rushing downslope before the freeze, knows it’s coming, too. Drink. Sharp, cold, crucial light glides down gullet. Drink. Every cell a sponge ensoaking, enjoying, enplumping. Singing the still-alive song. Stare up. Ear twitch. Swallow whistle. Crow call. Nod. Life. It sounds of Life.

Thumbpnk, thumbpnk. Vibrational sensation in the paw, tickled inner earbed, another apex creature enstepping forest floor. Thumbpnk, thumbpnk. Rhythm of one flat foot keeping time with the other, all heaviness and graceless and uncouth. Two-legged. Human. Though…this gait. Thumbpnk, thumbpnk. Familiar. Not as careless as most. More controlled. Thumbpnk, thumbpnk. Ear swivel, vision follow, everything at once alert, defensive, curious. Patient. Anticipatory. Sat, quite still, on haunches. Chest buffed and proud. Unafraid. Especially if. It’s that one. Louder now, closer, cellularly certain of this specific bipedal pattern. 

A way of walking that sounds of clumsy snowfall, floating through dense cluster of water birch, emerging without a scratch. Immediately seen, wolf by woman, woman by wolf. Stare. See eyes, kind and cautious, troubled, overflowing saltwet. Smooth brow of submission, slight furrow in the center, vexed. Scent of acrid fear, odor older than everything. Teeth bared in invitation, not in threat. Not the first encounter. Come smell what I’ve been eating. The last of this season’s peaches. Elk heart. Wild blueberry, honeycomb. Snowshoe hare, hide-to-marrow whole.

Unenviably upright but with fingers long and nimble. Palm so cupped and capable, thumb a manus miracle, stare and bare and sniff until, from between linen layers at the breast, the hand emerges holding. What is it? A few trots closer. Looking, now. Like an acorn or pinecone, but cracked. From the crack, the smallest tendril of a future. The last peach sproutling, said the woman. But all I understood was sadness, slowing the sounds she let loose from the dark cave of her mouth.