Build the Fire Higher, Dear

I'm working on a paper-cut of a hummingbird right now. I was flipping through photographs of hummingbirds online when one photo suddenly jogged my mind home.

We have a screened porch on the front of our family's home in Pennsylvania, and my mother keeps filled hummingbird feeders on the open deck leading to the porch door. The hummingbirds have been coming to these feeders for years. When I was eight or nine I spent a summer dressed in red and pink standing beneath the feeders with my fingers outstretched. It took some patience, but the hummingbirds eventually accepted me and sat on my fingertips to rest when they came to feed.

After a few days I became convinced I could distinguish between the hummingbirds (all ruby-throated). I knew there was a particularly bold male who liked to sit in the oak at the top of the clearing, and I thought he was larger than the others. I called him King something-or-other; I don't remember what. I kept a logbook and wristwatch nearby so I could take detailed notes of all activity. I must have been writing poetry that summer, too, because I remember one poem in particular that I wrote about the hummingbirds and our lilacs.

Another summer a hummingbird got caught on the inside of our screened porch. He pushed his beak through the screen and became stuck; that was how we caught him. Holding a swooning hummingbird in your hands is an act that requires the same degree of breath-stopping gentleness as painting Starry Night on a fly's wing (such painters synchronize their brush strokes with their heartbeats). This is how carrying a hummingbird feels: if you so much as blink your eye, you might involuntarily crush him.

When I held him in my hand I saw he had skinned his beak when pushing it through the screen. A small curl had been scraped back and was hanging near his nostril. A hummingbird with a skinned beak.

But the real memory that looking at these photos jogged is from three summers ago. I was home for a month preparing for my ride west; I suppose it was May. As I was hurrying in through the porch door one morning, something caught my eye, and I abandoned my course to look more closely. Held against the screen by the flow of air, down low near the handle, were two infinitesimal feathers. Hanging in the shadows, they looked charcoal gray. I pulled them carefully away with the tip of my finger and carried them into light. Held to the sun, they crashed and exploded the scarlet light waves with an intensity I've never witnessed in any man-made reflector. They were the red neck feathers off a male ruby-throated hummingbird. Brought back into shadow, they changed back to solid gray without even hinting at their previous brilliance.

Didn't the Aztec kings wear cloaks made of hummingbird skins? These men must have been blindingly radiant in sunlight. There was a huge market for skins in Europe during the mid-1800s. Hummingbirds were so fascinating and beautiful and incomprehensible that they were being caught and slaughtered by the thousands -- or, actually, make that hundreds of thousands.

This brings to mind a quote I read recently in the beginning of a book. I cannot for the life of me remember where I came across this... only that it was last summer. The passage essentially made the observation that some men, faced with nature or wildness, are so overwhelmed with love or passion for it that they can think to express themselves only by firing guns into it. (If anybody can tell me where I read this or where I can find it again, I'd be thrilled.) Is a similar compulsion at play when women demand avian genocide in the name of hat ornamentation? The desperation to possess beauty, I think, is the same.

But back to the radiance of yesteryear: I read in a recent novel (The Kingom of Ohio by Matthew Flaming) that when people began installing electric lights in their homes, women complained that their diamonds didn't shatter the light as well and appeared dull. Diamonds are most brilliant by candles and firelight. I suspect women appear more attractive by firelight, too; nothing hides the flaws so well as shadow, and what warmer light exists than candle-cast? Replacing our fires with wires has probably done a lot to dull our passions across the board; our diamonds weren't the only ones to be sedated.

The feathers I found on the front porch lived for a time in a dish on the windowsill above the sink, where I could move them between sun and shade at my whim. And then I moved them to a more secret place, where they remain -- another token of wildness stolen away into human possession.