And Slows His Horse To A Meaning Walk

Animals all around me these days, drawing my eye, and I don’t know if they’re just more there these days, or if my perceptions are heightened, or if some hand is tapping and pointing and gesturing at me. If I can’t say, who can?

I sat today at lunch, slow-chewing my meal of leftovers — hoarded and beloved and anticipated — and watching the parking lot around me, and the cold clouds covered all, and a bush next to me moved as if breathing, and a mockingbird arose from its leaves and sat and sang for a while, and she watched me — yes, I just know she was a she — and I tapped the pads of my index fingers together in tiny applause for her noontime aria, the silver notes spilling out of her throat, lost to all but those who could hear her, all those who would hear her. all those who looked at her while her beak was opening and closing. “All those” would equal one, and the one was me. Me, I, who strewed crackers before the sun spread across the parking lot. Me. I enjoyed her.

My wife and I were driving a few days ago when we saw the unsettling sight of a possum trotting down the embankment beneath a highway overpass, confident in his little footsteps, jaunty in his gait, focused on his task. He reached the concrete retaining wall and found what I suppose he had already known was there — a fast food bag with something inside. While waiting for the light to go green, we watched him turn the bag over and over and pull it open and reach inside and –ah! Pommes de frites! The bag bore the trademark logo of a fried chicken joint, so naturally we dubbed the possum Bojangles. And we prayed for his safety as we drove away.

I pass a pair of donkeys every day while driving to and from work. The female is buff-colored, and she has been lying down quite a bit lately. This worried me. Today I got a good look at her. I think she has a little donkey inside. I like to think I’m right. I like to think of a little runner-kicker galloping around the field in a few weeks or months, his ears longer than my femurs. I like to think of stopping by with a bucketful of Cheerios. Donkeys love Cheerios. This I know.

The birds are poised to send me to the poorhouse. I’ve filled all the feeders and the two platform feeders every night this week, and they are bare by dusk. When I walked out this evening to look at our grapevine, twisted around the arbor I built some years back, the cardinals were sitting in the boughs of the pine tree next to me, preparing to go to bed, and they sang to me. To me, and yes, I know they were singing to me. And I extended a hand to them, a hand that has gripped weapons and stroked cheeks and signed checks and scrambled eggs, and I said to them in the cold, shifting air of the evening, “If anyone alive is your friend, I am your friend.” And they sang on, and they came to eat one more time before Thor’s Day eased into Frigga’s Day. They sang on, dressed in red, with their bandit’s masks and their conical beaks, and their staccato songs.

A doe dead on the median this morning. A calf running on the hills and kicking up his heels this afternoon. A cardinal, a robin, and a house finch bathing in the puddle in our driveway this evening. An emaciated cat peering at me from the brush on the roadside. All the sadness and pleasure of the ones to whom I speak a foreign tongue, from whom I cannot understand a syllable, all of it captured in these rapid images of my sun-hours, of my gloaming.

Friends, all of them. All of them.

~ S.K. Orr