Rusty Blackbird

Kneeling above a small hummock just feet above the Yukon River, I stroke my beard in solemn thought: at this particular stretch the water billows into an inconceivable width, a furious torrent, yet sluggish and heavy with silt. The effect is dazzling, as if scope and depth plunder along the murky thalwag, wrestling with seventy-foot long spruce logs forever gone in seconds. A deer fly swallows a piece of my neck. Proboscis full, a mosquito buzzes away with my blood. What appears immobile is swept away in great flux, as textured as the stones at my toes, shattering in scale. Radmila Halaslava floats a smile and carves my stomach with laughter. My pants are busted at both knees as I rest, sewing them in contemplation. Two Rusty Blackbirds twirl in territorial birdsong, and the omnipotent sun that’s been hanging at our necks every moment for two months heats the pine duff into a lofty, aromatic ease. A light breeze—‘Boreas’, as we call it by its Greek mythology—lifts every leaf on an aspen synchronously, revealing the unique patterns etched by the larvae of moths on their separate undersides. There is no discomfort in having nothing to say because we’re not going anywhere else for three more months; every moment is erupting, unfolding, and dying in our own hands; every observation part of a continuous impression that awes and inspires a shared idea swept into different parts of the same river. But at a 99% decline, what about the Rusty Blackbird?