Things have been weird. On Thursday morning a strange bird came and knocked on the door. For real. I saw it on the patio through a gap in the curtains. It's body was sooty and dark. At first I thought it was a crow. Then I saw the black webbed feet and the sharp curved beak. I thought then that it was a cormorant -- a juvenile. Often the juveniles look dark gray. Adult cormorants have glossy and dark olive colored feathers. This bird wasn't glossy, and seemed somewhat disheveled. I wondered what it was doing on our patio, which is behind a natural wall of plants and under an eave and about a mile from the beach. It tapped at the glass door. Birds, even when they flock to our feeder, never get so close. I watched it for a few moments. At last, it settled on the welcome mat and faced the glass.

I opened the door. At that point, the bird hopped clumsily away. It didn't fly. It was weak. I knew to rescue it. I brought it to the bird center. J studied the bird and murmured, "I don't know what that is." She went to fetch her book. When she returned, she identified it as a parasitic jaeger . "An evil bird" she said. All I saw was a weak and frightened bird. The book described the bird as "the pirate of the seas" whose shadow "cleaves across the tundra, striking fear in the hearts of all who glimpse it." It is described as a swift and agile flier.

Later that day, I googled bird omens. As someone interested in animals and divination, I was especially intent on learning what it means when a bird knocks on your door. What I learned from the internet made me worried. Over and over again, accounts that the arrival of a bird means death. Death death death. I thought of how it felt when I held the bird -- how light and fragile it was. How wild. It wasn't death that it made me think of, but vulnerability. Everything alive is vulnerable.

Many birds are clepto-parasites. Many animals. Including people.

I think the description of the bird as "evil" is unfair. Perhaps it is a bird that cannot bear to kill, but knows that it must consume flesh to survive. Nonetheless, I am not convinced the bird is a skua. I think it is perhaps a type of shearwater. In my memory, it looks a lot like this:


Even though the bird was weak, it managed to tear several shallow cuts on the skin of my hands. They are in a neat little row, and they remind me more of claw marks than beak marks.

Yesterday, my adventures with birds continued at haskell's beach where there were reports of weak and injured cormorants. On our way down to the beach, we crossed paths with a falconer. He was driving a little golf cart and three birds -- an owl and two falcons -- perched on bars where there is usually a back seat. The nearby Baccarra resort uses owls and falcons to chase seagulls away from the expensive suites. The falcons wore little masks that covered their eyes. The owl was gorgeous and bored. "He's happy as long as he gets fat," the falconer explained. He wore long leather gloves.

Down the rocky beach, under the old pier formerly used by the veneco oil corporation, six young cormorants were huddled against the rusting barriers. Offshore, there are a few large platforms that serve as cormorant colonies. Because of the waves and the strange angles of the structure, it seemed as though it might be impossible to corral the birds. K and I attempted to corner one of the birds, and as I lunged forward to block it from entering the surf, my head hit one of the metal bars extending from the platform. I was suddenly flat on my back, in the sand and kelp. I was seeing stars. I brought my self up, the earth undulating beneath me. I was up in time to see K get the cormorant into a box.

Tomorrow I will go and see the bird who knocked on my door. Perhaps s/he will be ready to be released. I know that there is more to this story, but this is all I can tell for now.

often the dreams involve difficulties in communication. this is a common dream theme. like trying to decipher what someone is saying under water, only instead of shouting or straining to hear, I am measuring my words...reigning in my desire to speak, treading lightly, scanning the faces in the room considering what I *might* say, clenching my fists, my jaw. In the dream last night I was in a house near my childhood home. It felt as though it was located in an old strip mall that had been converted into a tiny beach village-- narrow streets and wooden clapboard fences and dirt alleys. The house was crowded with a variety of people, living and dead, familiar and strange, old and young. There are many details that remain familiar -- the need to do laundry, the lack of curtains in the showers, the absence of hallways (simply room flowing into room), the general sense of almost poverty and dirt. But the detail that remains most vivid involves my hair. In the dream my hair, as it is in life, was long and thick. One of my friends or roommates -- it seemed we all lived together in all the houses, sometimes switching houses and rooms-- was a hairdresser. In the house I was in, there were many young girls between the ages of 5 and 12. They seemed to be without parents, and I had a sense of wanting to take care of them. Although they all had long dark hair (like mine), they needed more hair. I'm not sure why. Visibly, I couldn't see why they needed hair, but I felt and knew that they did. The hairdresser friend suggested that I donate some of my hair. I agreed. But somehow, before we could discuss how much or from what part of my head the hair would come, he had reached over and sheared the left side of my head. I wasn't completely bald, but my head was very lopsided. I wanted to complain; the hair on the right side of my head is much thicker than it is on the left and had we discussed it, I would have asked him to take hair from the right side. I was angry at his presumption and arrogance. But I didn't want to complain because one of the little girls had already sewn my hair into hers. I didn't want her to feel my surprise or anger at the man with the scissors because I didn't want her to worry that I didn't want her to have my hair. Instead of registering my disappointment with my friend, I said very loudly "I'm so glad that she has my hair." I said it very loudly several times. Everyone looked over at me and smiled. Later, when everyone was busy again, I went into the dusty alley and cried. It wasn't even a feeling of loss or sadness about the hair, but rather a feeling of terrible loneliness from which it seemed there would never be any escape.

Last night I dreamed that a new friend gave me a beautiful sweater. It was very colorful and very fuzzy and very warm. I think the point of this dream is to be aware of comfort -- to be aware that even in the midst of loss, there is the miracle that someone will try and will be able to offer comfort.

Fever Break

A yellow beak curving away
from a bright plastic body, orange
and clean, gleaming as a clock's
arms ticking. The twisted sheets
for another day go unwashed.
My skin winking, my lashes
I can feel them against my cheek
and the body's sweet sinking
it remains, chiming as if to press
the point that loss goes on living.
I can't bear to see your things
again, not without you with them.

It isn't a dream but it feels like one. Halfway through the birds it started to rain. A drop here and there. J gets a phone call. My sleeves are wet from cleaning the filter in the pond, a process that requires me to crouch at the slate egde and reach my hand deep into the cold water to withdraw the feathers and leaves that gather in the filter's pores. There are always clumps of feathers, mostly the small feathers from when the birds preen. J says "wait" to the person on the phone and asks if I can go out to the lagoon to fetch an oiled grebe. I say okay. I was going to take an injured seagull to be euthanized, and it is a better errand to try and rescue a live bird. I am handed the phone and given a series of detailed but complicated directions. I try to listen, but in between visualizing the lagoon and the paths and the dunes, my attention scatters to the way rain is beginning to fall more steadily on the red slate rocks of J's patio. Then I leave and drive my car, which for some reason feels impossibly small, to the edge of the beach facing southwest. Because of the curved land, some of the beaches face southish here. I park and make my way with the blue plastic carrier past the shaggy south edge of the beach where the water is whipped white by the rain and wind and there are piles of large sad rocks. I traverse the large dune which is like a forehead and is vaguely ben bulbenesque. I hang onto my hat. The dune is muddy and criss-crossed with tire tracks where the ice plant has been cut away by bikes and hikers. I walk and look over the edge of the cliff where there is no beach, only the slapping surf. The dunes are large, and there are moments where there is nothing but white sky in sight. And then the dune slopes north and west and the green lagoon rises alongside. And then on the other side a thin taper of beach that curls and widens to a sort of half-moon swath of sand cluttered with bits of driftwood -- laurel and cypress and eucalyptus. The little beach is like a pile of sticks, a pile of matches. I am looking as the lady on the phone instructed -- looking amidst the grayish bits of matchstick wood for a long white neck. I am looking and looking for white. There is sea-spray in the air and it smells good. There is also the smell of oil, which is why I must find the grebe. The woman on the phone warned me that there were two dead birds near the live one, but I do not see them. Suddenly, I see a thin strip of white bending up and down almost like it is being blown by the wind but it is moving as a living thing moves. And the thin white strip is the thin white neck of the grebe and then I see the yellow beak and up closer the bright red-orange eyes. I put the blue plastic carrier on the sticks and approach the bird from the back. It's feathered body is like a raft adrift the sticks. I have a towel that I softly toss over its head as it begins to squawk. I gently grab the neck and scoop up the bird and, like always, I am surprised by it's lightness. The bones and feathers and wet. And the sticky oil underneath. I put the bird in the blue plastic carrier. It is only when I shut the gate and lean down to peer into its shadows that I am aware of the warm life inside the carrier, the sheltered quiet of the blue plastic as the waves and winds and sticks and oil shudder. And I feel the familiar relief of discovering that something is still alive. And is safe. And is still alive, still living.