Bird-Here-Now
By Michael H. Kew
Wee puffs flit from corvidian croaks—wee clouds from louding wonks—voluminous dents thrust into the still of dawn chill.
Hunchbacked, he struts and stares.
wonk-wonk!
Between smooth small long-interlude sets, Oregon’s ocean is quiet, lakelike—lapping. Slow southeasterly Sun is levitating, backscratching the tall black serration of Sitka spruce pressed against December dry-spell sky against low seaside ridge of rocks and holy ravendom.
[bob-weave-bob-weave]
Relishing the cardio effects of swimming, my breathing braids with his rhythm. Breathm. Rapid exhalations relaxing to renewed reality of being on land.
wonk!-wonk!-gurgle-gurgle
A riddle?
Raven smarts, yes. Abstract of mind. “Bird-brained” is not an insult.
Facing the wave and skirting the cove’s high-tide line lies a thin white film of frozen brine debossed with talon tracks in loops of inquiry. Back and forth he steps and cross-steps, scruffy neck feathers fluffed, long hooked beak ejecting microexhalations of CO2. Rejecting and accepting nothing.
gurglegurglewonk!wonk!
After I’d dug a rail and fallen, the leashless single-finned surfboard had lazed up onto our shaded graysand arc of privation. I'd bodysurfed in and crouched ‘tween board and raven’s ice patch that is destined for mist, for ice breath—beach yet to feel the early Sun, itself a spiritual inversion of the Cold Moon just now plunging toward horizon behind our rough tufted cape a half-mile north.
[weave-bob-weave-bob]
wonk!
Wee clouds. Visuality of spiritbreath.
I sit and smile at him. Momentum pause. Cross-legged, I shift weight to hips, flexing toes inside blood-warmed wombish membrane of bootie juice, fingers in gloved glory, spine straight, gaze fixed out over the surf. Slowly <inhale> a vast cold lungful.
Hold.
Amid this floaty tranquillity I note further descendence of heart—pulsed heat—and raw upper body vaporizations through five mils of black neoprene.
Dermal mist. Skin breath.
wonk!
Ravens—North America’s biggest songbirds. Fey skysingers of white magic. Feathered black cats. Playful. Manipulative, communicative, decisive, deducive, emotive. Our twinly twined breaths are blown west to mingle ‘mongst sea-smoke evaporations—48° water into 30° air. Morning shadows dance upon the murk—shreds of high cirrus and changeling light mooding offshore against the sheer black crags of basalt. Realm of gull and oystercatcher, murre, puffin, cormorant.
Raven skips from crust of ice now tickled clear by sunlight and fattening tide—slithery beach breath, the peak of which will soon spawn sloshy backwash and drown the surf spot. In, out, refreshing and energizing, respiring revolving door of moony magnetism.
On the ice’s edge, raven’s head is reflected. Prompts thoughts of Janus, Roman god of passageways, looming month of January eponym, infamously two-faced animistic spirit.
And my sight eases, soft-focus, blurring to the rhythmic Pacific risings and crashings, the constant cosmic reabsorptions, the winter whites wheezing, water the masseuse of sand and rock, blue veneer a gateway, surfing as ceremony.
Flecks of Sun tap sea-stack tippy-tips of Twin Rocks. My eyes slip shut and scene falls mute into an open plane of silence. Recall some old words by zenmonk mystic Merton: “Prayer? Prayer is how I breathe…The gate of heaven is everywhere.”
<Exhale>
wonk!
Raven and I—deeply inside.
(above) Photo: Kew. (main) “Messengers” by Spencer Reynolds.
