Rebecca Spiegel

Our relationship to the world, as it is untiringly enunciated within us,

is not a thing which can be any further clarified by analysis.

 –Maurice Merleau-Ponty

I.

I am writing about dead creatures I’ve been wandering into; what I really want to write is everything on my mind. How to enter into that mess? Need an anchor—so, bodies, I guess. Not symbolic, just a fact. I was told to write what I see and it’s what I’ve seen everywhere lately: dead birds and leaves turning yellow, tiny signs beside trees that read “Please Be Respectful” which looks different to you than to me.

II.

Bird small and black on her side, one delicate, wormy leg exposed, half-slit of a dark eye, fully intact, 3D. I bend down, let a fingertip go where it wants: to the feathers, soft and light. Three shiny green flies—two to her eye, one to her underbelly. I write her over its because the pronoun keeps the body a subject: an underside of rich brown feather exposed. I crouch to look closely, take a photo. Why do I do this? A short white man in a purple shirt says, “Good morning.” I take this to mean I see you what you’re doing. He wears glasses, the red stroller he pushes is empty.

I say, “I’m taking a picture of this bird.”

He says, “It’s a good-looking bird,” and we both walk away.

III.

Susan Sontag writes of an ethics of seeing in On Photography: “Photographing is essentially an act of non-intervention. […] To take a picture is to have an interest in things as they are, in the status quo remaining unchanged […], to be in complicity with whatever makes a subject interesting, worth photographing—including, when that is the interest, another person’s pain or misfortune.”

IV.

I have to stop trying to figure out what to do by scrolling through never-ending squares on a phone screen. I can hold two truths at once, but I cannot hold twenty. To whom am I supposed to listen? Do I want to be gentle because I am afraid, too worried about being right or at least not offensive? My body lies still on a bed. My dog sleeps warm and prone against my right leg. What right do I have to rest? My eyes keep on closing.

V.

Bird so barely dead, almost asleep in the grass, almost at rest. Though the sleep of a bird sounds not all that peaceful: unihemispheric slow-wave. One brain half rests, the other remains awake; split of self into selves to look out for; an eye wide open or shut in accordance with how

much brain needs to be kept in play. Her beak was long and orange, slender feathers brown, belly like quiet French vanilla ice cream.

VI.

In an article about birds dying after colliding with windows, a man says, “It all takes time. It is an exercise in honey versus vinegar.” He says, “It is slowly, but surely, becoming socially unacceptable to not deal with the issue.”

VII.

It’s been less than ten minutes since I sat down to write and already I’m here, unable to face the depth of my own uncertainty. Each dull feather I imbue with meaning says more about me than it does reality. Perhaps this is part of the problem—perhaps it is painful to be overwhelmed and unsure. Still, some glow hovers beside me, some sense of a thing or two I might know. I am not unmoved by these dead bodies but I am numbing. Uneasy, unsure, I eat and I stare at my phone. I keep dreaming, keep feeling sick to my stomach, keep heating water for tea and letting it go cold. I keep passing people on the street, trying to be not too friendly, not too cold: a Goldilocks of passersby who do not, I’m aware, think twice about me.

VIII.

Box turtle ground into the ground, a black body with thin yellow stripes sucked from his shell, head nowhere to be found, unidentifiable, one webbed foot gently resting in the sand among old leaves and new shoots of clover. Midsection of interior exposed, like peering into windows while walking city streets, which I like to do, and finding a half-eaten body instead of the usual couple of phones on a couch, room either silent or filled by a flat-screen TV. One night, I see a man feeding a giant fish in a giant aquarium. It isn’t real. He is standing beside a giant nature documentary. I am grateful for the misperception, for not feeling a need to know immediately, for allowing myself a moment of mystery.

IX.

I was once with a small man in a small pickup truck in southern Thailand. Together, we went toward a set of giant blades which took blocks of frozen water and crushed them, the sound like glaciers calving, like buildings collapsing into cold water: old, tired, done. As we drove toward the ice mill, I saw through the passenger window an endless grove of rubber trees, then a kitten on the street. Hard pavement, rubber tires, puddle of blood—his body, twitching, on loop.

X.

The dog wags his tail by my feet, then pivots, walks away suddenly. What did he hear? It’s windy outside, battle of leaves against powerlines, some stunted limb curled up and amputated, wire coated in plastic, sound of sandpaper. Restless not quite the right word. Don’t know what is except never enough time, like how a pink foil balloon in the shape of a 2 floating against a backdrop of blue will grow tired of the sky, let go of its gas molecules, succumb to gravity.

XI.

What I’m trying to say is I keep coming across hollow-boned creatures splayed out, sometimes not even splayed, sometimes squished into cracks like part of the sidewalk, save for the tough of a claw or beak. What does it mean? Perhaps nothing. Perhaps there is no way to know. Sometimes I find fruit instead of dead animals: mahogany figs and deep berries, shrunken plums, pears like lanterns among leaves instead of pairs of dull eyes and insects who move in to feast. No phenomenon will disappear because it’s one I’d prefer not to see: dead bodies on concrete, the thought that I’d rather know nothing, how repulsive my own responsibility.