Companionable streams

It's all about you, isn't it, William?

Today is October first. On August sixth, I met an aloof duck at the pond on Liz Carpenter Square, near Auditorium Shore, in Austin, Texas, where people live. That Saturday in particular had been difficult, and when Seorin persuaded me to accompany her to the river to shoot a music video about the very rabbit whose death had made that day, and many like it, so intolerable, I hesitated. But I went anyway, afraid to be alone in our apartment, save for the company of Birthday, who does not console. By the time we arrived at the Square, the open air and sunlight had relaxed my mood, so, after setting up our equipment and playing around at the camerawork, I wandered off to the pond to accost the turtles. Turtles be damned. At the water's edge I spied a remarkable brown and orange bird, unhurriedly tasting the day's pleasures, like a cowboy at dusk on a high plain, loafing and inviting its soul. I was captivated.



Twig, twig, twig, ooh! Bug!

Over the next hour we gained a reluctant knowledge of each other. I, like a thirty-year-old toddler, wanted to pet the feathers from his hide. It, like a bird, preferred I go fuck myself. Every few minutes, armed with a bit of apple (my only lure), I approached, centimeters at a step, only to watch it shuffle itself precisely the same distance away from me. Even when I gingerly tossed a chunk to--and not at--it, the animal was unmoved. Finally, our purpose exhausted, Seorin and I packed our gear and I parted ways with the bird, bidding it wellness and thanking it for its friendship, although, honestly, what a prick.

As it happens, the bird and I met again the next time I came to the Square, and again, and again, and soon I was going out of my way just to visit the disagreeable fucker. These escalated into trips to the pond solely to stand in the bird's presence--at the stipulated distance, of course--and stare at it, as the duck, in its avian resoluteness, stared only ahead. Like a zen bird or a flying Cato. Singleminded. Over the weeks I grew attached to it, and even to its unfriendliness, which I took as an Oriental handshake, and I began to research the breed (which I never identified), its diet, its migratory habits. Every day that month I thought about the bird, and at least once a week, and usually much more often, I drove far out of my way, through an unpredictable and baffling mid-day traffic, to check on my adopted duck, of whatever breed, whose sudden appearance at the pond that Saturday changed, for me irrevocably, the landscape and significance of Town Lake. On the rare days when I couldn't find the bird, my heart ached for its absence; on its return, my heart swelled stupidly.

Then, one day, when the duck wasn't there once too often, I had to accept it. Ducks are migratory birds. Or maybe it had had enough of that disheveled, jittery guy the with bags of buckwheat and decided to move downriver, where he could meditate peaceably. Either way, the bird was gone, not for an afternoon but forever. Mine was an awkward, unrequited care but I basked in sharing it. For its part, not charging and biting me after the fifth refused handful of grains, I guess, can count as a kind of affection. But I miss my bird very much, and not a day passes that I don't look for it there, knowing the pond's only permanent occupants, like bad astrological signs, were established long ago, before my desires came to dislodge and contradict them. Now, with the bird's abandonment, I feel sadness scoured in each ripple, and when the children weave wildly through the fountain's waterjets, I get weak with loneliness. It's a haunted place for me now, not because, as with Yeats and his swans, the disappearance makes me ponder time's vicissitudes or other heady business (look where that thinking led him), but because, in my childish, obstinate way, I want my bird back. Even if it never liked me.

But Yeats wasn't wrong. I always admired the poem's elegance and delicacy. Its lines read quietly, in a barely touchable way, heartsick and tired but gentle and universal. Now when I read "The Wild Swans at Coole" its final stanza pierces my stomach straight through. Sometimes in life it takes an arbitrary loss to culminate your sense of the world's leaving, its transformation to a place first you first don't like, and then you don't recognize, and finally to a place where you don't exist. When we find they have flown away, we miss the birds, sure. But we also learn by their exit that although they no longer live for you, in your life, they continue to live for others, in theirs. It's impossible not, from there, to abstract to the proof that dooms Yeats to self-soreness: the world goes on without you. Unkind, isn't it, that a cliche can hurt so much and yet be so certain?

As for me, I've decided not to focus morbidly on myself and, unlike that Irish narcissist, to honor the bird's adventure rather than bewail my getting older. So bird, I christen you Ulysses. Go seek and find. Though much is taken, much abides, and wherever you land, and whatever charity you spurn from whomever's hand, remember the lines you can't know, you not having language:

I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.

Be good, duck. Thank you for all you gave me, which was mostly nothing, and for letting me love and learn from you. Thank you for chance. For accident. For my growing older.



He works his work, I mine.