Intermittent rattle. Machine gun fast. A pause. Another round fired off.
Silence.
I step outside, barefoot, and look into the trees that line the side of my property, just outside the fence along the creek. Squirrels chase up and down the closest one, an oak with the massive wound, evidence of a lost limb. Its limbs diverge just above the fence line, rise 50 feet or more, forking again and again, twisting on themselves, a tight weave of branches and leaves.
Blackbirds swoop in. Pick at the back lawn. Rush off as the rattle starts again.
Rat-a-tat. Quiet. Repeat.
The squirrels sprint along the top of the fence. Four gray ones, two obvious pups. They race up the tree, around its bulky trunk. One zips onto a reed-thin branch that bends and twists from the weight. Like a trapeze artist swinging above the netless circus floor. The squirrel flips and leaps to the fence and runs off.
I think of Ferlinghetti. Of the “high theatrics” of the poet/acrobat risking it all, “without mistaking / any thing / for what it may not be.”
The squirrels rush back and forth. There’s a lawnmower in the distance. I have grading to do, and I need to finish power washing the patio. Around the corner, someone is hammering. The banging inconsistent, lacking the tight rhythm, the innate purpose I hear high above me.
U2 comes on the radio. Larry Mullen’s military drum rolls. “I can’t believe the news today,” Bono sings, a narrative of loss amid “The Troubles,” a massacre by the Brits of unarmed protesters in Derry. “How long, how long must we sing this song?” he sings.
Drum rolls in the tree. Almost like gun fire. Mistaking what isn’t for what is.
I am frozen in awe at the movement. Step from the paving-stone patio onto the grass. Move toward the drum roll. Because I can.
We mistake distance for safety. The privilege of place for virtue. The White man on Fox News asks “What about Black-on-black violence?” Uses it as an excuse to do nothing about guns. About state violence against African Americans.
I remember interviewing a young African American in New Brunswick. He was no more than 12, lived in one of the low-income housing projects. Would sometimes hear gun fire through his window at night. From the gangs defending turf, he said. It happened almost every night. This was 30 years ago.
There was a shooting in New Brunswick last week, just blocks from the recreation hall on Paul Robeson Place where we talked. Half dozen so far this year. It is only May.
Seven miles south. I stand barefoot in the grass watching the squirrels. A rabbit scoots from below the deck. Freezes when it senses me. Flees.
Deer rustle through the creek. Trample the small plants and new vegetation. Rush off as the rapid rattle returns above.
A cardinal flies across, left to right. The black birds return, shine a blue-black, onyx-like, in the morning sun.
The squirrels ramble up the tree. The rattle resumes. The squirrels flee along the fence top and onto another tree a distance away.
I hear Larry Mullen in the trees. Hear Bono: “How long must we sing this song?” Hear the words of a woman from Central America I once interviewed. Undocumented. She lived in the shadows here in Central Jersey. Told me she dreamed of the gunfire that repeated as backdrop in her Guatemalan village. Nightmares, panic attacks. Would start at a backfiring engine. Would freeze at the jackhammers tearing up her otherwise quiet street.
Jackhammers on the trunk of an oak. Or a maple. Jackhammers. Drum rolls. A Gatling gun echoing in the May morning.
The guidebook calls the woodpecker a living jackhammer. A powerful excavator. It digs into the tree. Forages for insects. Drums to communicate. Calls, responds. A warning. A claim. Woodpeckers are territorial, like the squirrels that invade the tree. Like humans. They take ownership of their nests, will do almost anything to maintain them.
As we do. We build our nests. Settle in our young. Build up our clans, our circles. Draw borders. Build walls. Defend the sanctity of our territory, push out its borders. Fight. With knives and bottles snd guns. Rocket launchers. Helicopters. Gun boats.
We’re not so different than the birds and squirrels and rabbits.
Not so different than the turkey vultures that will arrive in a few days. The tree line a rest stop on their travels. I will watch them circle above, think of Yeats, the “widening gyre,” the “lion body,” “the head of a man.” The birds are indignant. The new century still young slouches in its blood lust, a vulture carrying its prey home.