About the Object of My Fall

I was seventeen years out from reading St Augustine’s Confessions for the first time when I cocked a rifle and leveled it at a blackbird. After, birdsong never quite sounded as sweet, as pears must have never quite tasted to Augustine after he and his friends stole from his neighbor’s tree a load of the fruit. Not to eat, confessing he had pears “in plenty and of much better quality.” But to barely taste and then “throw to the pigs.”

Not yet possessing the Augustinian language for my guilt, from ten years old on, my body grew around a heart that hung in my chest as from a pear stem. Hung there and pecked at, beak-scored more and more and then, two years before reading Confessions, I read Seamus Heaney’s poem about another saint: “St Kevin and the Blackbird.” Reading Heaney’s poem, I swear—and forgive me the melodrama—I heard birdsong. Ribcage-muted, but birdsong all the same. A jingle really. Then resumed that familiar pecked-at feeling as still does from time to time. Though, since, the intervals of time between those times have lengthened, filled with movements, sometimes whole symphonies of birdsong. Sometimes they are filled with only silence. Silence enough to hear real birdsong coming from the trees outside the window of the room where I write this. I want to say to them: Unpilfered feathered fruits, stay clawed to those branches. Watch with eyes like BBs for the gun-leveler, the trigger-happy ten-year-old. And fly off at his approach. Fly. Pick yourselves off the trees by the stems of your legs. Rise. Do not fall, picked by yourselves and not he whose heart is so, O God, is so heavy. Whose heart is my heart twenty years older, pecked to the core. Pecked but not lighter for such. The strain on it is that of a hand tugging on a pear just so but not enough to snap it off the limb.