Blackbird an online journal of literature and the arts Fall 2007  Vol. 6 No. 2

 

AMEY MILLER  |  Chicago: A Commonplace Novel

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              Our southern town holds at last estimate 43,977 souls, plus the 14,037 in our contiguous adjacent town, which used to be but is no longer the serving town with the railroad depot. The complete student population of the university being at last count 24,189, we are like a snake with prey visibly balled up inside.
       Somewhere we picked up the slogan “the southern part of heaven.” Mostly what puts us on the map is our basketball team, but we are perhaps a little bit renowned for our belle-lettres, southern progressive politics and scholarship, and a good slacker music scene. In a dissenting view, a certain Famous Senator has suggested that our town is such a freak-show, it would make sense to put a fence around us and charge admission . . . .

     The farmlands have reverted to woodlots, and in the summertime it’s like living in a dense arboreal copse, can’t see the sky—and the din of squirrels and cicadas and Carolina wrens and mourning doves and cardinals and blue jays and crows & etc. almost but not quite drowns out the leaf blowers and lawn mowers and chain saws and cement mixers and tree grinders and UPS and FedEx and Airborne Express and the helicopters coming into the regional hospital or the jet planes landing fat cats at the too small for them town airport, or the bigger, higher jets going into The International Airport a half hour away, here

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So how do you read
one first story, Adam
and Eve’s impossible koan?
Does it tell how humans
lost touch with their
animal neighbors?
Just lost touch in
general? It is hard
to imagine God
being as unforgiving,
as relentless,
as that story gives out.

 

carolina wren

Carolina Wren by H. Douglass Pratt      

  In a voice so loud and rollicking that it eclipses the songs of all other birds in the neighborhood, the Carolina wren announces its presence in woodland tangle or dooryard shrubbery. Wheat-eater, wheat-eater, wheat! he clamors, and, without a break, switches suddenly to Giddyap! or Tea-party or It’s-raining! all in the same cadence and pitch. And he sings practically all day long, the whole year round, no matter what the weather. But he can scold, too, and in this the female joins him, bobbing in excitement, jerking their tails, irately chucking any tresspasser out of their territory.
       Carolina wrens are southern birds, never migrating, spending year after year on the same range. But unknown pressures often send their youngsters northward. So long as the winters are mild, they survive to build resident populations. Then comes a bitter winter, severe and pitiless. Since Carolina wrens are not migratory, they do not instinctually turn southward. They stay, and they perish. Even as far south as Maryland, all the boisterous Carolina wrens have died in a single winter.

Readers Digest
Book of North American Birds.

 

      So it is, anyway, that my Hanna lives in my town; that I am her neighbor, so to speak, or in fact. She can talk too much, or too softly, or with garbled, self-dismissive laughs. She doesn’t get down to brass tacks. Like many of us, she is looking for love in wrong and right places, and she has a story to tell.

Genesis 3

 

“. . . unto the woman he said I
will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee. And unto Adam he said . . . in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground . . . . So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life . . . .”

 

 

 
 
 
 

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