Starlings

All the starlings I have known are dead. Summers I’d scrape them off the school house lawn—their nests on the edge of a slate blue roof—babies featherless, heads too heavy, breathing shallow as promises of drunks. I’ve known a few of them, too, heads dipping and rising before the final plunk. There’s only so much you can do, which by age seven or eight I knew about drunks, but baby birds I thought might be saved with an eye dropper filled with milk. Some mushed-up worms. What I wanted to shove down their throats was song, echo of their parents’ cartoon chirps, their imitation coughs of crows that peppered the school yard willow. Damn. Starlings will mimic anything: drunkard’s bellow, eighteenth-century allegretto. Mozart once bought a pet starling when it whistled his G major concerto. He was flattered, I am sure, though maybe too like me he thought a song could save a thing. Could save a starling, anyhow. I buried those babies on the school’s vast grounds. Marked the place with stones. Winters I would visit there while my mother drank alone. Quiet, I’d tell the babies’ ghosts as their murmuration rose far above the schoolhouse roof its belly full of stars.