Читать книгу Trophic Cascade - Camille T. Dungy - Страница 6

Natural History

The Rufous hummingbird builds her nest

of moss and spider webs and lichen.

I held one once—smaller than my palm,

but sturdy. I would have told Mrs. Jeffers,

from Court Street, if in those days of constant flights

between California and Virginia I’d wandered

into that Oakland museum. Any chance

I could, I’d leave my rented house in Lynchburg.

I hated the feeling of stuckness that old city’s humidity

implied. You need to stop running away so much,

Mrs. Jeffers would say when my visits were over

and I leaned down to hug her. Why her words

come to me, the woman dead for the better part

of this new century, while I think of that

nest of web and lichen, I cannot rightly say.

She had once known my mother’s parents.

The whole lot of them, even then, in their twenties,

must already have been as old as God. They were

black—the kind name for them in those days

would have been Negroes—and the daily elections

called for between their safety and their sanity

must have torn even the strongest of them down.

Mr. Jeffers had been a laborer. The sort, I regret,

I don’t remember. He sat on their front porch

all day, near his oxygen tank, waving occasionally

to passing Buicks and Fords, praising the black

walnut that shaded their yard. She would leave

the porch sometimes to prepare their meals.

I still have her yeast roll recipe. The best

I’ve ever tried. Mostly, though, the same Virginian

breeze that encouraged Thomas Jefferson’s

tomatoes passed warmly through their porch eaves

while we listened to the swing chains, and no one

talked or moved too much at all. Little had changed

in that house since 1952. I guess it’s no surprise

they’d come to mind when I think of that cup

of spider webs and moss, made softer by the feathers

of some long-gone bird. She used to say, I like it

right here where I am. In my little house. Here,

with him. I thought her small-minded. In the winter,

I didn’t visit very often. Their house was closed up

and overheated. Everything smelled of chemical

mothballs. She had plastic wrappers on the sofas

and chairs. Everyone must have once

held someone as old and small and precious as this.