Ashfall and a Window Strike

It rained ash on and around our home last night. I haven’t experienced anything like that since 2011 in Walla Walla, Washington, when a flaming tumbleweed breached a controlled burn line and set a field, then more than just the field, ablaze. Even then, the ash-rain never reached our home. We just ended up in it one day when we went walking in a nearby town. Ash-rain isn’t real rain—of course not—we’re in a drought. It’s just rain in the sense of raining down, the way water does but isn’t.

The smoke is affecting wildlife, including a juvenile Bullock’s oriole who hit a clerestory window this morning on the north side of our house, despite our following the method David Sibley uses at his home for protecting birds from window strikes. We have custom screens on all the large windows to protect the birds, but we draw vertical lines every four inches on the outside of the clerestory windows with a Sharpie. (As of this writing, those lines are now two inches apart.) This allows birds to see the windows and thereby realize they aren’t passable. They also interpret the vertical lines as branches, so they tend to steer clear of them. This method works for us, or at least it did until this morning when the young oriole, perhaps disoriented or otherwise weakened from the smoke, tried to fly between two of the Sharpie lines.

It was a hard hit. We heard it throughout the house. We have a protocol we follow when wildlife is in distress. Within minutes, the nearest wildlife rescue had been called, the bird had been placed in a special container we use for transport, and I was on my way to Wild Friends, a subset of Best Friends, over in Kanab, Utah, so the bird could get medication to prevent brain swelling and gabapentin for pain management—that is, if they survived the eighty-minute drive.

I would never drive to Kanab, especially not this time of year, because the only roads there and back are festooned with wildlife who rest on the asphalt, cross the asphalt, fly over the asphalt, and otherwise end up in harm’s way with every passing vehicle. Right now, many of these critters are young, or littles, as I call them. They’ve never seen cars before and don’t know the danger they pose. Juvenile birds don’t fly well and haven’t learned to stay above the cars. Baby squirrels think the roadways, which are cool in the morning, are a great place to hang out and socialize. The roads to Kanab are human intrusions into lands that belong to critters. We don’t belong there. I didn’t belong there. But I knew the oriole, who lives in my yard and fledged recently, would die without help. So I took the risk and drove carefully and stopped when animals were sitting in the road and slowed down and veered this way and that as needed and even slowed nearly to a crawl at one point with my hazard lights on because there were too many animals for higher rates of speed to be safe.

I nearly hit half a dozen animals. I navigated around, beside, and under another hundred or so. Then, right where Arizona turns back into Utah and the speed limit jumps from 25 miles per hour to 45 miles per hour, I saw what I thought was a rock squirrel sitting up in the middle of the oncoming lane. I slowed but couldn’t stop because the guy in the truck behind me was following me too closely. As I approached, I assessed the situation. The squirrel didn’t move. I thought I could continue, slowly, in my lane, and everything would be OK. It wasn’t. The squirrel darted in front of my car just as I passed, and just in time to be hit by both my front and back left tires. I heard it. I felt it.

I stopped to collect the squirrel and take them to Wild Friends with me if there were signs of life. There weren’t. And it wasn’t a rock squirrel. It was a stoat, a kit at that. Not even an adult. I killed a tiny, beautiful stoat, one of my favorite animals on Earth, whom I’ve never seen in the wild until today, when one was lying in the road where I hit them.

I should say lying in the road lifeless. The kit was dead. Body trauma, head trauma. I thought of William Stafford’s poem “Traveling through the Dark,” only this was daytime, and it was a stoat, not a deer, and I’m the one who hit them, not just the one who came across the body. I also thought about how every being that lives causes other living beings to die. Today, that fact was laid bare. I, a living being, helped an oriole live, but in doing so, I caused a stoat to die.

I moved the stoat off the road so ravens and vultures wouldn’t end up getting hit while trying to feed on the body and so people wouldn’t swerve trying to avoid ravens and vultures because to swerve might make more dead, as Stafford says. I also didn’t want the stoat’s body to be hit over and over again. That sort of thing makes me sad.

I apologized to the kit and said a small prayer before returning to the oriole, who needed to get to the rescue for treatment.

About eleven minutes from the rescue, the oriole roused and wanted nothing to do with being inside a box inside a car with me. It was a good sign. The rescue staff said the bird was old enough to get a full dose of all their medicines and that, based on how they were acting, they would most likely make a full recovery. I said Jon and I could come back for the bird and release them at our house. Wild Friends likes to make sure that happens whenever possible. I’ve known that bird since they fledged. I know their whole family. The wildfire here may make coming back impossible, which I understand. Fresh air is important, and we don’t have that right now. But I hope they recover and can come home.

May the fire stop burning. May the smoke clear. May ash-rain be replaced with real rain. May the oriole survive and come home to Toquerville. May the stoat rest in peace. May love restore what we fear we’ve lost forever in our lands, our hearts, and our minds.

—

The birds who sound like they’re laughing at funny jokes are actually Western kingbirds, not Bullock’s orioles. My bad for providing inaccurate information about that in earlier posts. Bullock’s orioles sound kind of like they’re saying, Oh, no! I dropped all my marbles or Look, my marbles! Right here. They are here, here, here.

—

The drive back from Kanab, Utah, through Arizona after dropping off the injured juvenile Bullock’s oriole and hitting a stoat. Highway 237. Outside Pink Coral Sand Dunes, July 11, 2025.

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—

I found out there’s another way to get to the wildlife rescue in Kanab, one that doesn’t require driving through the area that’s so densely populated with wildlife. I didn’t know about the other way. I should have known. Friday would have gone very differently. I wouldn’t have hit and killed the stoat. I also found out that another wildlife rescue has opened in Enoch, which is much closer to my home. I don’t know if they take small birds or if they have the medicines needed after a window strike, but I’ll call them and find out tomorrow. It’s hard to be the reason another living being is no longer living.

—

Some deaths hit me hard. Andrea Gibson’s is one of them. I didn’t know Andrea, but I knew their work and their heart and the spaces they created for others in this world. I haven’t really moved since I learned Andrea died. I want the world to be kinder than it is, as kind as Andrea was. My heart is with all living beings and the Earth we share, which means it’s with Andrea, who is everywhere now.

In the morning, I’m bringing the Bullock’s oriole home from the wildlife rescue so she can join her family and the other orioles who are summering along our creek. Jon is coming with me. We’re taking the long way, the one that avoids the most sensitive wildlife habitats between our home and Kanab, Utah.

The oriole made a full recovery thanks to the rehabilitators who cared for her. She’s enough to get me moving again. Life is motion. Love is motion. Everything is motion.

—

We just got back from the wildlife rescue in Kanab and released the Bullock’s oriole. She flew right into the tree where her family has been hanging out. It might be the tree she was born in. The other orioles were in that tree yesterday evening singing their comical tune as the sun set. Orioles always sound like they’re recounting funny stories to one another, then laughing hysterically. It feels like they’re making fun of humans, which is fine by me.

The orioles didn’t know they’d soon be reunited with the juvenile female they thought they’d lost. They didn’t know she’d return at all. Five days is a long time to be gone and then appear again seemingly out of nowhere. She’ll never be able to explain what happened, and they wouldn’t believe her if she could.

When we got close to the tree and she could hear the other birds, the oriole started to dart around in her enclosure, eager to fly free. Then she did. All I saw were her spread tail feathers as she flew away, her body a noisy propeller trilling through the air.

I’m actually not certain the oriole is female or a juvenile. That’s what the rescue believes, but it’s difficult to tell immature males, immature females, and mature females apart. She’s duller than I would expect a mature female to be, and she lacks the eyeliner I would expect to see on an immature male. There’s no hint of black on her throat, which immature males can have, though probably not birds as young as I believe she is. She had the same clumsy flying behavior I’d seen the fledgling orioles, presumably her and her littermates, exhibiting a few days earlier. Taking all these factors into account, a juvenile female is also my best guess.

Her age matters because she needs to get back to learning how to be a bird and gain as much experience as possible before migration this fall. Five days is a lot of time to lose when you’re new to the world and need to get everything figured out pretty quickly in order to survive. She also needs to decompress from the stressful experience she’s had. I hope she has the time she needs to recover, learn, grow, and thrive.

We have bird-collision film approved by the American Bird Conservancy on order for our clerestory windows since the lines we drew on them didn’t prevent this strike. In the meantime, we’ve covered each window with a thick layer of soapy film. We can’t really see out of them, but that’s fine. I will wrap my entire house in blankets if it keeps birds like this oriole from being injured or dying.

—

Two Bullock’s orioles, a male and a female, just landed in the shrub in front of my window. I think the female is the one I took to the wildlife rescue for treatment after a window strike and later released here at our home, which is also her home. If you felt the ground shake a little wherever you are, it was from my heart exploding with love and joy. The epicenter of that seismic activity was Toquerville, Utah, latitude 37.2310016, longitude -113.2756992.

To Sleep, Perchance to Dream

Yesterday Jon and I stood on a pier at Juanita Beach Park for a long, long time, waiting for the beavers to return to their den. We’d seen one of them bobbing along the far edge of the water, its wet furry head above, then below, then above, then below the surface. With only the head intermittently in sight, I had to imagine the rest of the creature, its chunky body and short legs, I supposed, paddling awkwardly beneath.

Sometimes the head would come up under a lily pad, which would become an impromptu hat for a foot or two before the plant’s tether would pull the leaf away and the wet furry head would again be revealed.

This is how night should come, I thought.

Jon asked if I was ready to leave yet. He becomes impatient with nature just as nature is about to reveal something to or about him. He likes to move briskly through landscapes because that keeps him in his safe, usual thoughts. Stopping poses a risk because that is when nature can change a person.

But stopping is important. We need to allow ourselves to let nature have a say in how we think about and move through the world. Just ask William Stafford, who urges us to let your whole self drift down like a breath and learn / its way down through the trees … Stand here till all that / you were can wander away and come back slowly, / carrying a strange new flavor into your life.

The beaver was nowhere in sight but we located a mother duck with six ducklings beneath her. She looked like an upside-down Easter basket with all its goodies underneath. She had found a nice spot to camp out for the night and was drifting in and out of sleep, opening her eyes whenever the grass moved, a small bird came near, or a firecracker was set off. I wondered then to what degree wildlife across the United States collectively worries on the Fourth of July. It must sound like the end of the world. Or hunting season.

Jon asked several more times if I was ready. “You ready yet, Bud? Ready now?”

This is how night should come, I thought again. It should come slowly over the trees, above the grasses. It should settle on the water just like this. It should guide the beavers gently and slowly through the water until they find themselves at the worn pathway leading to their den, where they pull themselves onto the mud and wriggle across decaying, tamped foliage, making the final turn into their home and out of our sight.

Yes, it should come just like this.

Last night is the first time in weeks I have not felt anxious and panicky as soon as the sun goes down. Since my test results, I have been so worried about what the diagnosis will be, what comes next and how my life could be severely altered or truncated. As soon as the light begins to fade, my heart rate and blood pressure have begun to rise. I have spent every night in a body that hums with fear. Fear has become its own composition with no end, no rests, no shifts in pitch or volume. Just its continual drone, its dissonant multi-tonal vibration.

But last night, night seemed natural. I was not afraid. I did not kick and scream my way into sleep or try to fight my way out of it once I was there. Last night I was a beaver. I was grass. I was water. I was that whole gloppy corner of the world taking up the darkness and whispering, Yes, yes.

Sabbagh-Szymborska

For two decades, I’ve maintained a list of quotes I like by poets, writers, and thinkers I find interesting. This post is part of that series. All posts in the series are organized alphabetically. Some poets and writers have their own dedicated pages.

—

Somewhere an octopus is being eaten by an octopus and not panicking. / Black dress to the floor, red acrylic nails, silver teardrop earrings, waterproof mascara. / I am excited to do this for the rest of my life and be terrified. / I hear a noise behind me and I don’t turn around. — Jackie Sabbagh

Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you. — Jean-Paul Sartre

And I want more for myself / than rare moments of clarity. / I want my entire life. — Amy Saul-Zerby

The only dirty water I will submit to be drowned or / bathed in is the mythic sea of incontrovertible / fortune — Alexej Savreux

a president can say “audacity” or / a president can say “sad” & both eat / the slow-cured meat of empire. — Sam Sax

how you can look back / on a life & see only salt there — Sam Sax

there are so many words for you children & / none of them are dirty—tho not all of them / are yours. now as you eat what your mother eats / her fear is your world torn & thrown to birds. — Sam Sax

The centuries-old debate should be settled: an intellectual world bereft of poetry is a damaged one. — Elaine Scarry

All I can think of is how fitting it is that in the end / it is your own poisons that get you. — Lauren Scharhag

I collect toadstools and hemlock / believing that it’s possible / to be impervious to their properties, / to know only their joys. — Lauren Scharhag

I dream myself wielder of the spear, / stunner, tanner, carrier of the bolt-gun. — Lauren Scharhag

I like the idea of serving the wholeness of others, / Purer than the laying-on of hands. — Lauren Scharhag

I think poetry is vivisection, and if you’re not willing to do that, you’re wasting your time — Lauren Scharhag

To take an object out of time renders it beautiful. That might be a big problem, as beauty shocks us more than ugliness. — Susan M. Schultz

all this / Memory for us each to read through / the long night and the cold winter — Jeffrey Schwaner

Does it matter that I was not counting? That I did not count the leaves / On the backyard maple but still enjoyed its new green shade. / Some things are not made to count. This fine spring rain in the dark. — Jeffrey Schwaner

God resides in the forearm, / Waiting like an owl. / In the lucid gloaming, / In the throttled air of hotels. — Jeff Schwaner

In the dark we pass / Through the membrane like birds / Escaping the owls of yesterday. — Jeffrey Schwaner

In the world are some animals whose feet / Never touch the ground. Birds who only / Land on the uncertainty of open water. — Jeff Schwaner

It’s not a ghost / which keeps you up at night / It’s certainty — Jeff Schwaner

Starlings pull up the garland of the sky and hang it on trees. — Jeff Schwaner

The continuous migration, slowing. That’s our life. — Jeffrey Schwaner

The end is a bridge / We have crossed before — Jeffrey Schwaner

The trunk’s shadow runs down the slope / Like a creek then rivulets of branches reach across / The road towards your porch like it has / Something to tell you, only you. — Jeff Schwaner

Whose migration over open space / Turns everyone’s heads though they hear / Only your voice on a quiet morning. — Jeff Schwaner

You are more / Than what you have paid in pain to be / transported here. — Jeffrey Schwaner

I used to think to be not alone meant / never having to walk through the high wheat / or struggle in the water. — Allison Seay

The only things here that don’t know / death are the mice that skulk / among the fruit, already gnawing / at the unshelled almond— / they’ve cracked the shell of another / one nearby—and you, of course. — Shane Seely

Again, with the digging, again with the digging up. / Once more with the shovels. / Once more, the shovels full of dirt. — Diane Seuss

I remember the color of music / and how forever / all the trembling bells of you / were mine. — Anne Sexton

Let me praise men for eating the apple / and finding woman / like a big brain of coral. — Anne Sexton

What a monster I’ve made. You see, instead of a lot of beauty from the throat, I make monsters. — Anne Sexton

You are the twelve faces of the Atlantic / and I am the rowboat. I am the burden. — Anne Sexton

Above the bed, the ceiling and the stars. Below the bed the floor, the earth, then out the other side and stars. I fell in all directions. — Richard Siken

After Crush was published, many people accused me of contaminating their bookshelf or bedside table with my melancholy. You never make me happy, but you can always make me sad, they said. I hadn’t anticipated this response and I wondered about what kind of culpability I might have. I, personally, was being held responsible, rather than the work — which had the undertone of “poetry isn’t art” because they refused to, or were unable to, understand that I had made a thing. They didn’t see the thing, they only saw me. — Richard Siken

Be disturbing and seductive and your poetry will follow. — Richard Siken

When this / vacation from thte void closes shop, my lungs losing their / winsome urge to rise and fall, when I can no longer / xxx and ooo, even via text, breathe deep the gathering gloom, / yak, yap, yawn, yes, yarn, yield, or do that lub-dub thing, until / zapping myself with a cocktail takes me where I haven’t been. — Martha Silano

I don’t know where the next poem is going to come from—a bit of language, an image, a mood, a recalled experience. Something sets off a train of associations and the poem begins. — Charles Simic

Inside my empty bottle I was constructing a lighthouse while all the others were making ships. — Charles Simic

I am a world in a world. All worlds are subject to death and decay, entropy. My feet hurt. — Eric Simpson

I lie on my back in the grass because I have been put in charge of the sky. — Sarah J. Sloat

The future is coming with the sole purpose that I might regret it. — Sarah J. Sloat

to remember the happy ending / in every book. to forget they were all white. to name desire as everyone who hasn’t killed you yet. — Jayson Smith

When we say that something makes sense, we’re saying that the mind can feel it. We don’t mean simply that the words it comprises make impressions individually. We mean that the utterance as a whole can be felt by the mind. — Matthew Buckley Smith

everyday’s an eggshell. / Hamilton thinks he’s a flying horse; / strapping him to the bed / slows his airscape gallop / somehow they get it into our rocky heads / madness is a crime & more. — Mbembe Milton Smith

Even the black mares shy at my lowing, / its widowish timbre / an emblem of morning, / a sickle heaving hay. — Joseph Spece

Writing is the gradual revelation of a wholeness already felt when one has the idea for the poem. — Stephen Spender

We pick up the shards of the world. / We cut our hands. / We pick up the shards of the world. — Ankh Spice

Awareness doesn’t have problems. In order to have a problem, we have to resist the situation. — Rupert Spira

You catch at the edge of a feeling or idea or glimpse or sound—and you don’t let go. You merge along with it, almost as if your hands play over it, pushing, extending, turning it over, encouraging it. And all this activity awakes other feelings, ideas, glimpses, sounds. Things get exciting; you let yourself be persuaded that a unity is possible. — William Stafford

a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt / color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, / not unordered in not resembling. — Gertrude Stein

After all anybody is as their land and air is. Anybody is as the sky is low or high. Anybody is as there is wind or no wind there. That is what makes a people, makes their kind of looks, their kind of thinking, their subtlety and their stupidity, and their eating and their drinking and their language. ― Gertrude Stein

An audience is always warming but it must never be necessary to your work. — Gertrude Stein

and their eating and their drinking and their language. — Gertrude Stein

I wish that I had spoken only of it all. — Gertrude Stein

Which I wish to say is this / There is no beginning to an end / But there is a beginning and an end / To beginning. / Why yes of course. / Any one can learn that north of course / Is not only north but north as north / Why were they worried. / What I wish to say is this. / Yes of course — Gertrude Stein

It’s not every day that the world arranges itself into a poem. — Wallace Stevens

Society, ignorant of medical research, makes a stigma out of something our bodies do quite naturally: not conform to a sexual binary. — Kathryn Bond Stockton

So often it is this. I wake up, urgent, fatalistic, / with the taste of nectar on my boughs. / I replay on a loop my one stoic consistency, / my middle of the night vow, / that I will start tomorrow / the essential dismantling / of what I live. — Bianca Stone

I ask him if he knows what it’s like / to drink two-day old coffee over lipstick stains, / to drag a road-sign with your mother’s / maiden name out of the ground, only to leave it / on your front porch in the rain — Mary Stone

Jealousy is nothing more than fear. Except when it’s a bird landing on the same wire day after day and simply flying away. — Mary Stone

The things he knows / of us. The things he remembers / and how it’s our father’s fault / we all learned to lie to survive. / She still wants to see him. / Says brother like it’s a word / like a brother is a real thing. — Mary Stone

Look: the boy / has come back, is looking you / hard in the eye, through / the crack of the door. / There, in his hand, a neon / plastic BB / gun. He does this for / his grandmother and for his / son. — Nomi Stone

In the longer view it doesn’t matter. / However, it’s that having lived, it matters. / So that every death breaks you apart. / You find yourself weeping at the door / of your own kitchen, overwhelmed / by loss. — Ruth Stone

In a field I am the absence / of field. / This is always the case. / Wherever I am / I am what is missing. ⁠— Mark Strand⁠

Writing is an experience that changes each time we do it. Each writing experience takes its own form. — Christine Swint

In consequence, the sorry fact is / that we arrive here improvised / and leave without the chance to practice. — Wislawa Szymborska

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