Читать книгу Pictograph - Melissa Kwasny - Страница 14

CHICKADEES AND THEIR ALLIES

The flower chart expresses in concise and graphic form the general lines of evolution from the ancestral buttercups, silverberry, sow thistle, goosefoot. The larger rocks crowd together in the downward stream. Water buffalo, bottom-feeding with their snouts. Patterned with lichen, the shadow of a chartreuse beard. They say, you, wading there, are like an ant, a speck of dust. You, who are busy and then gone. And the cloud cover? Eccentric. Who rose at six to paint a second coat of ocher on the walls. A staging ground, where we eat our lunch, scatter tobacco. I am trying to find out what bird accompanied us from the cave, a black-and-white one, but was it wagtail or eastern kingbird? Enigmatic birds, like people, like rocks—who knows what are their shields or what protects them? Four grosbeaks land out of nowhere, like dried leaves, with citrine veils. I mistake the raindrops on aspen limbs for buds.