If it is doubt which I see there in the sandpiper’s eye as it hurries along the mountain beach in Spring, an injured wing held tight but fanning down at a pained angle, feet moving in an aimless-as-ever, wandering hunt, skitter-stop and shivering on, looping back, circuitous, to where it had been a moment before, what then does it say about worry and fear and loneliness?  Its home is not here, where it finds itself alone, if anywhere ever wasn’t its home.  Its steps barely disturb the grains beneath them so that there is hardly even a footprint for the waves to erase but they come anyway, in firm rhythm, to set the sand back to its order.  The small bird cannot know any longer if it will make it to where it is going, if it knew where that was when it began, but there is hardly a difference in its movements from others of its kind, only a slackened wing and a vague quiver, possibly imagined, in those black little eyes.  And, except under a higher grace, what does the world care about a sweet, brave insubstantiality such as this?

Above and around, the swallows dip, glide, and arc out across the still water of the marsh behind the piper and I, banking up where their iridescence catches the sun, flaming an unnamable blue and twisting over into a keen crescent of gray and white, slipping on behind the budding willows, swooping down to drink on the wing among last year’s brittle reeds, or spiriting up into the suddenly empty sky.  Even when they come to rest for a moment, fearless pilots alighted on the nearby fence’s thin wires, hesitation never seems to trouble their head.  What must they ask themselves, if anything, when it is time for them to sleep?

A movement of mine and the roused head of a Flicker spikes up from the old grass that’s been wind-pressed into waves. The small flames of its feathers fan out for a moment as its wings wheel over in retreat, leaving behind no trace of its flight.  Still, near me, here and there, caught up in that yellowed green sea or clung to the husks of old flowers and thistles, can be seen a few lonely feathers kept from slipping away.  From owners all different and departed, here’s one weathered grey by the winter and formed to the ground where it fell; nearby a small scattered circle of russet-striped white, clipped and scored at the shafts by a powerful beak; and just one more tethered there to a dry stem of mullein, dancing alive, with both vanes shining black as it turns in the breeze.  Scattered pieces then discarded but what beauty is it in them that they still seem to feel the lack of whatever free thing left them behind?

The air, for the moment, is absent of swallow flight, holding only a few thin cirrus strands.  But one cannot call it lonely with the screech-song call and response of the yellowheads from the tops of long-crumbled cattails, the questioning song of the Sora hidden in the heart of the willows, or the competing chorus of the redwings’ high trills.  It’s only sometimes out here, where answers seem certain, that I ask what I’m meant to be learning and fill myself up with a worry which I hardly know how to name.  Far out on the marsh, a tern curves skyward out of the growth- black-headed, sharp, white, and circling out over the spread of calm waters before it.  Behind me, the piper can no longer be seen, and I know what I hope but it’s off and away on a secret trajectory whose end can only be guessed.  The tern hover-hunts now, holding midair, wings quick doubled up, then splaying out to the sun like the fair spirit of rising itself though its eyes are fixed down on something below.  And I’ll swear to you here, before it occurs, that emptiness never truly exists, that renewal is inevitable if sometimes elusive, and that the lame wing of doubt can be healed if only to convince my own nervous heart.  It takes just a sudden, subtle tuck of the pinion beneath and a fluid lean down into a long, scything dive to send up that shimmering splash from which arise both the tern and its wriggling catch.  Still, I don’t know what to tell you about what has been lost or what never was but- whether that same lonely fear is lodged in the fish, a part of the sharp grace which lifted it up, or living quite strong in both lives at once- I cannot trace it exact but somehow it must be all raggedly bound with the old, beautiful hope which makes up the marsh where the blooms are not back, nor even the buds, but the green shoots of life are returning and, wherever its feathers may drift, that little piper will be safe-- I know in my blood.