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Some saints, we know from paintings of them, kept a Death’s Head on their desks to help keep things in perspective. Some slept in coffins, too. To each his own. On my desk, I have a bird’s nest with a single egg in it. The nest is a thatch of twigs and grass, bowed, twined, and fastened into a cup (what a handy tool a beak must be!), with a few papery beech leaves and a swatch of cellophane from a cigarette pack thrown in for good measure. The egg is the palest bluish-green, almost white, with brown specks and splotches. It is so light and fragile I’m afraid to touch it. I discovered the nest while hacking away, clumsily, at the multiflora rose bramble by the back door of my garage, which was overgrowing the mock orange and other shrubs, whose names I’ve yet to learn, planted there by a previous owner. The job was clearly overdue, but now I know, I should have been more careful. There were two eggs in it then, two fine little twins they’d be, and I wondered what to do. I piled the cutaway canes and branches loosely over the section where the nest was, hoping to shelter it sufficiently so that whoever made it would come back. For two weeks I watched as the clump of dead foliage browned and stiffened, half-expecting, at any moment, to see a song sparrow (the speckled pale green eggs, that wellformed cup). But while the cardinals seemed suspiciously proximate one day as I walked by (they’d nested in the mock orange in front of our picture window two years ago, a looser nest though, and a squirrel ruined that), in the end, nobody came. When we got down to one egg and, sure sign, potato bugs had taken up residence, I deemed the nest abandoned. So I disposed of the ugly ad-hoc camouflage, and appropriated it for my own edification. There must be some lesson for the careless suburban home-owning mortal in this, I thought: let me have it. Of course, the beauty of the thing is edification enough. It is artfully formed: the cup so firm and neat, but loose enough to please a modern’s eye. Crooked twigs along the rim fly away at angles, like the warp for the brim of a half-finished straw hat, to an outer circumference maybe three nest-widths across. To my overheated imagination (the competition are saints, remember, and mostly mystics at that), there is something in this that resembles pictures I’ve seen of galaxies, that spiraling of starry arms thrown wide, but better, since to me the stars pose only questions. Here, nestled at the center, the way the earth was once thought to be nestled in the universe, is an answer—this perfect, speckled egg, as secret and delicate as inspiration, waiting to be born, and born again. Yes. Well … That’s how I thought of it at first, a worthy counter to that saintly skull. But then, a week or two after I took the nest, it was time (past time) to cut back yet another undifferentiated mass of shrubbery. Again, we’re talking mock orange and multiflora rose, some forsythia, more honeysuckle (shrub and vine) than should be tolerated, and who knows what else. This particular collection grows between our
MOUNT HOPE