There’s this bird lady and she saves birds, you know, the ones that fly into high buildings as they migrate. The highest skyscrapers turn off their lights for three weeks during the autumn migration and for some lights-off is not enough because there’s still clear glass and seductive atrium trees.
With a butterfly net in hand, at dawn, she trawls the base of buildings, traps dazed birds and puts them into paper lunch bags. Wild dry flutter-rustle in bursts like someone drowning coming up for air
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Hours later, still that sound.
Until she packs it away, closes the trunk of her car, looks up and then at me, What an ugly building, she says, all that terrifying possibility. Walking home, and for days and weeks after, still today, I look up, see their proud sleek lines, that tall seductive glass. Some are in awe as they fly past
an earlier incarnation published in Cleave, 2008
