I Kill A Bird

On my way home today, I was driving into town - no more than 20 mph - when I noticed a bird flying in on the extreme right of my peripheral vision.  Its arc was wide and in a moment it had flown down and in towards the underside of my car.

Everything about this death seemed soft: my foot on the brake; the bird's low flight; the quiet thud of its body - bone and feather - against the wheel arch; the flurry I saw in my left wing mirror.  Even the scale of this loss -  perhaps a thrush? - seems soft, against all the other losses.

All evening, I've felt a blur of regret, a sense of what Gerard Manley Hopkins calls "cloy" in his devastatingly beautiful poem, Spring.  I've felt the ache of gratitude for all the life of this blustery Mayday - for "all this juice and all this joy", for the "rinse and ring" of it.