A tiny, feathered death

and a Wednesday memorial.

I found a woodpecker dead, lying on the cement under our window.

The Northern Flicker is common enough around here, and some dismiss them as pests. They hammer into shingles, decks, anything wooden in which they can burrow and can be destructive. In spring, the flicker will also make metal piping their landing zone and rattle away on it — I can only assume using the amplified raucous to draw a potential mate.

“Dude, come on,” I laugh at the morning vibration descending and filtering into our living room, “You should know by now you can’t get blood from a stone.” I drink my coffee, scratch my nose and think, “I don’t know the mind of a flicker.”

Anyway, one was dead. Like I said, I found it on the cement under our big window, maybe confused by it, reflecting false light of true sky. Maybe it was sick, or old. I don’t know the lifespan of a woodpecker.

I rush to it,

A beloved, fallen thing.

I do know every creature and person who dies should have someone to go to its side, an immediate and swift anguish at their passing, an exhale of

‘Oh no, not you!’

Squatting beside it and observing its detail I note, the specificity of its markings is rather breathtaking. It is as if a painter held it gently in their hand, put a freezing spell on it (immobulus) and set to work.

Being held in this way, the flicker would have been warm and breathing, small chest expanding, tongue at rest on the floor of its tiny red mouth, eyelid slid over the beed of an eye. And as the painter takes their most intricate, most smallest paintbrush — so pristine because they only use it for perilously precious particulars like the following:

the pupils of a field mouse

the lips of a newborn clown fish

the spring buds of a subalpine larch

the dots on a Northern Flicker

— dot, dot, dot —

Their other thumb strokes the birds head while it sleeps, caressing its eye with the brush and a different shade paint.

Stripes too — the painter might switch to ‘one number greater’ of a brush for these.

— swipe pause swipe —

And a splot for the island of orange-red fire around its chin.

This would take quite a long time, to paint a Northern Flicker.

When the painter is finished, still damp and sticky, needing the breeze and the movement of the wings to completely dry, they say the spell to awaken it (innervate) and it comes to itself, shiny, full of life and completely whole. Heart, lung, bowel, tongue. Dots. Stripes. Precious particulars.

So I stare at the dead one, for a moment thinking oddly of a front door knocker at some lakefront beach house. Grim.

We bury it in our front under the blue spruce, well away from the terrier-nose who patrols our back yard.

My husband digs a small grave. I watch the dirt cover it. As the dust settles between the feathers into its downy firmament, sifting through to begin its work of decomposition and reabsorption — ant-y, wormy, buggy renewal,

I consider:

What a gift, a thing to hold, on a regular day, a precious dying thing;

A small grief for something, maybe gone unseen until the moment of its passing.