By Brooks Haxton
I am like a pelican of the wilderness: I am
like an owl of the desert. I watch, and am
as a sparrow alone upon the housetop.
Psalm 102
The pelican in scripture is unclean. It pukes dead fish
onto the hatchlings, and it roosts alone, like Satan
on the Tree of Life. Nobody told me. I liked pelicans.
I liked owls, too. I used to lie awake and listen,
wanting to become an owl, to fly, to see through darkness,
turn my head and look straight back behind me. I was
happy, as kids go, but I did not belong in human form.
Sparrows peck grain from fresh dung. In this world rich
means filthy. Leopardi, in his high Romantic musings
on the sparrow, does not say the poet is a shitbird, just
that, singing by himself, he acts like one, and wishes
he could feel more like one, unashamed to do so. Here,
the preacher (burning in his bones with fever, puking
half-digested fish, and hooting, sleepless in the ruins
like the baleful dead) cries: O Lord, take me not away.
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Tuesday was all chores, laundry and sorting and stuff, not really worth describing. Despite it being muggy, I did take a walk, and I met the new teeny frog living in the neighbors' fish pond that also has a slightly larger green frog, plus we now have several black squirrels in the neighborhood.
Adam went on a kayaking tour of beaches and caves in Rhodes, then rented a bike to visit the observatory, where he ate dinner and saw things 20,000 light years away. Plus, in his own words, he did some "parent-worrying rock climbing along the cliffs by the hotel where there were 6" colorful crabs."
We had veggie salisbury steak for dinner and watched the season finale of Einstein, which was great and sad though I wish there had been more explanation of how Einstein thought unified field theory should work -- later episodes had much more politics and personal life than physics. Hillwood in orchid season:
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