A Grief Observed

“Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.”
                                              – C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed.

When I call, I ask, as I always do,
if she can name what’s happening inside.
These days, she says, I’m trying to memorize
which song goes with which bird.
I’m awake anyway, and first light of dawn
brings a leaf-shaking choir of them.
I listen to a trilling ricochet and say:
dark-eyed junco; and when I hear
a shrill quaver frame a staccato churr,
I say right out loud: Ah, spotted towhee.
The mewling adagio of a red-breasted nuthatch
is unmistakable, not like the
clutch of brunching sparrows:
White-crowned, Gold-crowned, Savanna, Lincoln –
I often get them crossed, all but the atonal
Chipping sparrow, more jack hammer than song.
But I’m getting better at untangling the notes.
And naming the birds has become a job I like.
And with each name I land my world expands – a little –
and I wedge myself back into the afternoon,
and walk into Save-On-Foods like a regular person.
In time, I hope to see green again,
because where there’s all this blue,
there’s got to be green.
Yesterday a great blue heron flew by the upstairs window,
looking, for all, like an oracle,
later, I found myself sitting under a yellow cedar
and I heard a cooing, wailing, then a bright piercing call,
right away I knew what it was, and I smiled at myself,
and I smiled up at the marbled murrelet,
hidden by a spread of thick limbs, 70 feet up,
invisible to me, but there, nonetheless,
like a brush with divinity, and I felt
real close to my partner of 28 years,
my lover for longer, and I shifted my body,
made room in the air, for the air of her,
which, quite unexpectedly, helped me to stand.
You ask what’s happening inside?
I’m opening windows in my bedroom,
and when I leave the house
I tuck the sky under my arm,
and go around naming all the winged beings,
like my life depended on it.