I inquire.
Do you believe in reincarnation?
Do you have an eerie, goosebump-inducing sense upon stepping into a place …
When reading, do you jitter as the words of a familiarly foreign culture wrap around you, scenic like cameras sweeping in a movie …
Have you paused in your day to knowingly converse on a subject normally outside the realm of your daily life?
Does the repetitive past grab your attention and catapult your future intuition?
Would the falling of a feather lead you to follow its path, or would you blow on it, far and away?
What if you found the feather, dried and preserved like an old forgotten flower,
In the creases of a family bible or a box of ancestral heirlooms or wrinkled in the cushions of
An overstuffed chair at your favorite bookstore or arbitrarily in your basket at the market …
Would it matter if the feather found you: diligently following or softly alighting in your path;
It is an anatomical sign, a symbolic promise, a token from years prior, a reminder not to forget.
She was a bird once.
Asian, probably, with eyes old as centuries.
Bird people she calls them.
She watches cardinals with joy and sadness as we understand the seasons.
She gives sparrows houses in all the trees, cries when the geese travel, pointed, somewhere “V”-ward, and snaps dishtowels at the hawks when they swoop in for the kill.
She wants to own an owl. Fascinated, I snapped some pictures of a preserved one last winter.
She eats grains and berries daily, daintily dropping them in bowls of yoghurt white like droppings.
