Birds sing in foreign languages, like radios played backwards, like the hands of clock straining to tick one second forwards. Yet the longer I listen, the more the melody shapes itself into something familiar. The warbler, the blackbird sample. Shapes repeating and pressed together, constructed dream like out of a library of experience. The longer you look, the more you see the burst of four-petal flowers, the mottled spots crawling giraffe-like up that tree, the nameless shades of green overlapping one another, the way the water dripping from drain pipe - for now, for now at least - makes a rhythm you can follow, rely on, predict. Patterns forming from repetition, passerine shriek becoming song just as you notice the seeds hanging from this tree look just like tiny pinecones.

The voice of my friend burbling in the background, clipped from digital static and heard through living air. The strangeness of closeness, the ease that comes so quickly it’s as if it has always been there. American Robin like thrush, like garden bird, like, impossibly, home.