Saturday in Back Creek Canyon, a shard of sky lay on the ground. It was a feather. A scrub jay shed it there, in a narrow escape or during molt. I thought of Kat, and stuck the plume in the webbing of my backpack’s strap.
I will send it to her, I thought, tucked into the outgoing package with the bits of California juniper and the bag of roasted corn, “Maiz Gigante de Cusco” the label says. If she were here, I thought, we would by now have adopted “Maiz Gigante de Cusco” as an exclamation of surprise. She would find some poetry in the feather, clear blue on one side of its meridian and dusk on the other, left for me by Raven’s colorful cousin, a dichotomous ephemeron woven of keratin and meaning and light. It is the outer web that shows the blue, a million prisms refracting sunlight. Scrub jays likely planted these small oaks, I thought, drilling acorns into the hard, hot soil, and this plume a calling card.
A thousand feet in one hundred four degrees through chamise and manzanita higher than my head, and I came out on the road through Murchio Gap. Out of the brush, the thin breeze off Moses Rock Ridge felt cool, and I looked at the little thermometer on my backpack strap: a mere 98 degrees. I shivered. and then saw that the feather was gone, worked out of the webbing with my ragged climbing. Ah, well.
Two days passed, and I rifled the mailbox coming home from work, and Kat had sent me a letter. I opened the envelope and out it fluttered, clear sky blue on one side of the meridian and dusk on the other.
