Re: Egrets

The regrets have come together, as they do from time to time, in moments mostly measured by change and seasons of transition.  The first arrive by night, the edge of night, and forming into ever tightening circles will shortly, surely, out of dense necessity begin to fall (with grace, and guilt, and misplaced shame) out of the wondrous sky.  A sunrise, pink and pastel purple, blue has been made blind by this assembly foaming white feathers, a mattress made of clouds.  Once white and light and airy, they are coagulating now.  The morning is as thick with regrets as summer is with flies.   

Some nervous, nerdy, ornithologist makes a notation in her notebook:  The bright white of the regrets' bellies and wings has thickened now to such a suffocating population that they and everything beneath them has been blackened as they block the sun.  This, she adds in frenzied script, is nothing less than an eclipse.  

She, we, all of us hold our breath and the urgency of all of this cannot help but lift our eyes up, up, into the writhing orgy of their flight.

Like stars, we name them; we know them to be wild (and better off that way) but, being human and proud of our taxonomy, we cannot help but want to possess them, individually or in familial clusters with words.  So with consideration (analysis, examination, identification and its fervor), we populate the sky and lake this neurotic individuation.   Where the name of some archetypal character (from Shakespeare or Puccini or Peanuts) fails to brand a regret to our satisfaction, we consider the banding of the bird's spindly ankle to assert relationship, the privilege of possession.  Too "humane" to support a circus, the rodeo, the zoo, we nevertheless are captivated by our capability to control:  an electronic bracelet is such a little thing by which to track the bird, the migration of the herd, the lovers infidelities, the god's premature death.  And every birder knows to keep--in leather bound book in waterproof ink--the all important list of those regrets that they have seen and known.  The bravest fetishist among us sketches carefully each line and painstakingly infuses pigment on the page; he demonstrates an elegance in these regrets that Audubon would deny them.