Feather

Wendy, I wish you painted feathers.

So the interview today went really badly, I mean, I'd like the job, I'm sure I can do it, but -- well, never mind. I came out into cold mist in the late afternoon. Novembery weather -- yesterday as so nice, what happened? There is a holly bush, though, whose cream berries are beginning to blush pink -- they look like wax orange blossoms, bridal. By the bus stop, in the verge between the sidewalk and the curb where the grass is grey with exhaust, there's this feather.

I pick it up. The shaft is white, a strong taper. The vanes towards the tip charcoal, shading down towards grey, towards the root on one side a silvery white. The shape I like -- the end is elegantly slanted and blunted, it looks like a uncial "I", maybe an old carved inscription that's rounded a bit. I think it is a pigeon feather, but that's just a guess.

When I pick it up I see it is beaded with the mist. This is the part that makes me think of you -- these drops of water. They are the smaller than any waterdrops I've ever seen, pinprick drops, but they are still drops, rounded and shining.

I like feathers very much. I like anything self-similar, you know, ferns and frost flowers and rivers. Even cauliflower. I like how the feather's vanes have what are called barbs, but are actually like smaller vanes, growing from each vane as the vane grows from the shaft. And the barbs have little barbs, and those have even littler barbs, which are microscopic. It's as if each feather is made up of a thousand feathers, springing from the shaft like palms. And each of those thousand feathers ...

I like how stiff feathers are, I like the scrope they make if you run your thumbnail across them (like one of those wood ridged percussion instruments -- African? -- we had in music class in second grade). I like how the edge bends to pressure elegantly like the edge of a sail. I like their iridescence.

The bus was packed. It smelled like poverty and high school. When I got back to work something horrible happened. I'm not allowed to tell you about it. It haunts me.

Anyway, I wanted to about the feather. I find a lot of feathers and keep some in a jar on my desk at work. My friend Heather wrote a poem about finding mushrooms once, about how they are hard to find but how once you start seeing them you see them everywhere. Feathers are everywhere, like that.

I don't think anyone sees them quite in the same way as I do. I feel strange. I feel like a stranger.

Wendy, I am very lonely.