Chickadee

My window is open and the sound of rain makes my fingers into a crowd of drunks arguing about love and politics. I should be working on a story, on grading, on any one of the numerous essays I have promised to write, but here I am watching a chickadee hold tight to her branch outside my window. Her eyes are half closed and she calls to herself as the rain shakes the needles of her pine tree. I am lost for a moment, my day playing back to me in fragments of classroom lessons and student conferences. The story I have sat down to write fragments and trails away. There is time to reclaim, to chase it down, but right now the chickadee is singing even though it is raining and I am lost to her voice. I wish for a poet, a writer who is unafraid to shape the metal of my emotion into something more than a paragraph on a tired chickadee and the memories of worn out lecture. I let the wind take my poetic envy, let the chickadee whisper her song, let my lecture finally die out, taking even its echo with it. Bird, window, writer, sometimes there needs to be fewer words to salvage the soul of the thing.