Betsy Sholl Starlings
Nay, I’ll have a starling shall be taught to speak… —Henry IV They’re everywhere, like phrases from Shakespeare, these birds crowding the suet with its greasy crumbs. They bully other birds, tear up shingles, pry apart the neighbor’s eaves. You can shout them off, but they always come back, all whistle and buzz, bits of night spackled with starspit, doves who dove into tar pits and flew out covered with grit. If Shakespeare lovers, hoping to populate this country with every bird the bard named, had them shipped from England, what does it say about us, that not the lark, but these creatures thrive, whose vocal range includes gravel crunch, car alarm, rusty hinge? And what does it say about Shakespeare that he still hovers around what we see, so I saw Lear when my cousin called to describe her father’s growing obsession with a flock of starlings that messed the car he no longer drove at night— Lear, because he’d given her all his worldly goods then wanted to run her life. Run or ruin: the two so at odds all she could do was everything wrong in his sight, while he stewed and fumed. Now, they’re both gone, he of old age, then she of some failure or refusal to thrive, as if without him the cigarette grit in her voice had nowhere to go, or she lacked the will of these birds, their stubborn intent to flourish, the way since their release in Central Park, they’ve spread coast to coast, and even crowd
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