By Joe Broadmeadow
A short story of a common scene to those of us who have watched a robin pull a worm from the ground. I often wondered what they were thinking, if such creatures were capable of this anthropomorphic quality, while this search for food and escape for survival went on….
If the bird succeeds, he lives and the worm does not. If the worm escapes, perhaps the bird, weakened by hunger, does not. A scene illustrative of the most common of events, the struggle to survive….
I know the robin before it lands.
There is a compression in the world above. A slight, decisive thickening of the soil, and then stillness. Not the stillness of nothing. The stillness of a thing that has chosen to stop moving. I have lived my whole life in the grammar of pressure, and I know the difference.
I go quiet in the way that I know how: not by stopping, but by slowing. My body reads the passage of time through the density of what surrounds it. The loam here is autumn-cold, its pores packed with last week’s rain, and I have been moving through it like a thread being drawn through dark cloth, the soil yielding and closing behind me as though I were never there. Now I hold. The ring muscles along my length tighten in sequence, front to back, a private wave of tension that goes nowhere. I become a coil of waiting.
I land where the light changes.
There is a seam in the lawn where the morning shadow of the fence meets the open ground, and I have learned that edges are where things happen. I drop from the low branch without ceremony, two feet placed, weight absorbed, stillness achieved, and I do not move again.
This is the first discipline: the body must become a listening instrument.
I tilt my head. Not from curiosity, but because my right eye belongs to the middle distance and my left eye belongs to the ground. The architecture of what I am assigning each eye its territory. When I tilt, I bring the ground-eye down to the grass-level plane where the shadows of individual blades fall short and dark across the soil, and I read.
What I read is not movement. Not yet. What I read is the memory of movement, a place where the loose geometry of the topsoil has been rearranged by a passage. The worm does not know that the ground remembers it. I do.
Above me, perhaps the length of my body, perhaps twice that, I feel the weight shift.
It moves with a lightness that is itself a kind of violence. Two points of contact on the surface, each bearing almost nothing, each placed with a precision that I have no name for but recognize the way one recognizes cold: suddenly, completely, in every part of the body at once. The bird is not heavy. That is the terror of it. Heavy things are clumsy. This thing is light and deliberate, and it knows what the ground holds.
I try to calculate the moisture gradient around me. Deeper is wetter, slower, harder to move through, but harder to be found in. I know this. But knowing and doing are separated by the pause that precedes all action, and I am still in that pause, suspended between understanding and the body’s answer to it.
I feel the lawn through my feet. The cold comes up through the scales of my toes and arrives as information I cannot separate from myself. Not data from outside, but a fluency, a language I was born already speaking. The substrate is wet from the week’s rain. It conducts. Things moving below conduct themselves to me through it, attenuated by distance and clay but not erased. Nothing is erased. The earth is a record.
Something is below me. I do not know its exact position. I know its general territory the way I know the shape of the nest I built this spring without ever seeing it whole, through accumulated partial knowledge, through the reading of signs whose meaning precedes my understanding of it.
I wait longer than the thing below expects.
This is the second discipline. The waiting is not patience in any human sense. It is the negation of impatience. A suspension of the part of me that always wants to move, tuned by ten thousand generations of aerial hunger to strike and pivot and be gone. Below me, the thing I cannot see may be waiting too. We are two waitings, separated by an inch of cold mineral dark.
The pressure points above me shift again. One, then two, a small rearranging—and something enters the soil.
Not far. Just at the surface skin, where the grass roots make their thin white lattice, and the dirt is nearly air. A probing. A bill, perhaps, or the shadow of one, or the intention before the bill, or all three at once. I cannot tell. What I can tell is the change in the matrix around me. The faint seismic whisper of the intrusion, traveling through the wet clay and the decomposed matter and the mycelial threads that lace everything together. The message arrives late and altered, the way all messages do when they travel through solid things, but the meaning is intact: something is looking for me.
My front end finds a pocket of gravel. I know its edges by touch, the smooth cold hardness of it, the way the spaces between stones hold air that has been underground so long it no longer knows what sky means. I do not go into it. I wait at its border like a question.
My left eye catches it.
Not the worm itself, I cannot see through soil. What I see is a tremor in a single pale stem of ryegrass that shudders once and is still. The shudder is not wind. There is no wind. The shudder is the surface expression of something passing below, the blade amplifying a vibration so small I would have missed it if I had been anywhere other than here, tilted, left eye down, listening with everything.
I drive the bill into the ground.
The soil parts and closes. I feel the resistance differently in the upper and lower mandible. The upper pushing through loam and root-fiber, the lower catching the edge of a stone, both registering a wet nothing at the tip. I withdraw and tilt again. The earth has sealed itself. It does not offer the gap back. The place where I struck is already becoming the place where I didn’t.
I move two steps to the left. The repositioning is precise, not guessed. I am following the direction of the tremor, backtracking the vibration’s propagation to its source, the way you might follow a sound by turning your head until both ears equalize it.
I have been here before. Not this exact cold and this exact bird and this exact stillness, but here, at the threshold of being found, where the whole of existence narrows to a corridor with only two doors. I carry in my muscle memory the knowledge of every ancestor who chose correctly, because those who chose wrong left nothing behind. This is the only inheritance I have, and it is enough to keep me alive until it isn’t.
The bill enters the soil again. Closer. I feel it as a sudden vacancy, a small collapse of the structure around me, no longer than the space between heartbeats if I had a heart to beat. Instead, I have this: a whole body that is nothing but sensitivity, an elongated nerve wrapped in rings of purpose, designed by time itself for the specific task of surviving in the dark.
I move.
Not up. Never up. I move at an angle that will take me deeper and laterally, away from the point of intrusion, through a seam of sandy till that offers less resistance than the clay above. The movement is peristaltic, ancient, completely committed, the front end reaching and fixing, the rear end releasing and following, the middle doing both at once. There is no thought in it. What there is instead is older than thought: the body’s absolute insistence on continuing.
I strike again.
The bill goes in at an angle. In the brief darkness of the entry I feel, or believe I feel, the resistance of something moving, the muscular language of something departing, something that has decided to become elsewhere rather than here. The sensation is so slight it may be my own desire making sense of nothing. I do not know. I hold for a moment, my bill in the ground, my eye at the grass level, everything attending.
I withdraw.
I stand in the ordinary morning. The lawn shows nothing. The light falls across it without interest, the way light falls across everything it has no use for.
Behind me, or above me—the geometry is uncertain now—the pressure changes again.
The soil settles. Or does not settle. I cannot tell anymore what is the bird and what is the earth simply being the earth, patient and enormous and indifferent to the drama it contains. The cold deepens around me as I descend. The gravel pocket is behind me. Ahead, the substrate grows heavy with moisture, with root fiber, with the slow mineral patience of the deep.
I move through the dark.
The dark does not answer.
I tilt my head one more time.
My left eye reads the undisturbed green, the roots, the slight depression where my feet have been. My crop is empty. Below me, the ground is what it always is: closed, amnesiac at the surface, keeping everything it knows in the deep. I am not certain what passed below, whether it passed at all, or whether it passed and got away. These are not categories I operate in. What I operate in is the field of what remains possible.
My nestlings are somewhere behind me, their hunger as ancient and inarticulate as mine.
The lawn is still. The shadow of the fence has moved half an inch along the grass while I have stood here.
I wait.
The ground keeps its answer to itself.
A moveable feast (apology to Hemingway). Eat or be eaten. Vivid detail and anticipation. Well done, Joe.
Thank you sir