Birds
for Hanif Abdurraqib
The day my grandmother fled her homeland, a thousand birds blackened the sky like night. That’s not true, but I never know what to say
to call you close. In their 1676 volume Ornithologiae, Francis Willughby and John Ray developed the first classification
of birds. Oh, bird. What will I do with you? Everything I write, a way of saying: look what I can do
with language. I am trying to tell you: I miss wonder. I wonder if nostalgia is what we invented to name ourselves species
and mean: we once stood on the same shore. If history were as brackish as what thrashes in us, how could we possibly worship our reflections? Show me
an animal who has built a god from such roiling waters. In my house, a stiller mirror. Some say glass is liquid moving very, very slowly. Speed it up
and, there, the ocean, like the one my grandmother watched the birds dive into—headfirst, all at once. Once, a woman fell in love
with a bird. She spent her whole life removing power lines and painting glass doors. Stay with me. I just want us to see
what we are crashing into. In 1758, Carl Linneas modified Ornithologiae to devise the taxonomic system currently in place. Classification
is a country. If the pens of white men had fallen differently, we might share a homeland. I might be a bird.
-- Claire Schwartz
