Last Bird of the Day
It has to do with the way it flings, madly, a shot punctuation mark.
It has to do with the way it leaps branches and telephone wires to ride the air to an invisible height.
It has to do with the tilt-a-whirl of feathers, and with the aria you know is sleeping in its throat. These are the reasons why you follow it with your eyes, as you sit in your car at the stop sign at Prospect and Broad Streets in Plattsburgh, New York, the afternoon your great aunt Esther Greene is celebrating her 104th birthday in Cleveland, Ohio Sit too long, watching, until it becomes a small comma in the clouds, and then higher, until it becomes the period yet to be placed at the end of her phenomenal days.
It has to do with each syllable of bird that has passed through your life in the book of phenomenal birds you will know.
--
Reprinted by permission of Saint Julian Press of Houston, Texas.
To learn more about Elizabeth and her book, go here.