Turkey bones simmer in the old steel soup pot…

Turkey bones simmer in the old steel soup pot. The cat curls in his basket. Early-winter sunshine warms my chair as I read the poems of old friends Harrison and Koosher. My eyes drift between the bird feeder and the page. The summer birds are gone but I saw two juncos and a pine siskin only an hour ago. The gold finches have faded to a kaki green. Soon the chickadees and nuthatches will appear from nowhere.

It is the aftermath of Thanksgiving and I am giving thanks that most offices will be closed for a few days, that the phone is less likely to ring, that, for the weekend at least; an afternoon nap will not be a source of embarrassment. On the news this morning I heard they lined up before midnight at a Wal-Mart on Long Island – an employee died in the stampede for things that probably no one really needed. Such bulletins are reminders that come Monday, my world will crank back up again. Already the mental list is growing as I read poems that are nearly all more important than anything on that list. It is hard for Jill and me to escape the sound and fury of this modern life that we have built. Even now – when I raise my eyes from the book to check the bird feeder and see miles of soft rolling hills, with eroding buttes beyond the cottonwoods of the Cheyenne River, I can still feel the pressure of the telephone at the back of my head. It could go off at any instant – the buffalo are out of the fence, a bill didn’t get paid, a child’s car broke down on the way back to college. It is ironic that even though we live in a place that many would consider a vacation spot, it is very hard to relax without leaving home.

Here is a confession: A few months ago Jill and I had reached the end of our collective rope. We needed to escape and so I called our travel agent and told her the situation. “We need to go somewhere where there is nothing to do,” I said. “We need warm, we need a swimming pool, decent restaurants, a bar, and we need cheap.”

“Do you like to gamble?” she asked.

“No. We hate to gamble.”

“Then the choice is easy,” she said. “Have you ever been to Las Vegas?”

“Of course not.”

“That’s where you should go.”

“You’re screwing with me, right?”

“Nope. Vegas is good. If you don’t gamble, it’s cheap.”

So we sneaked away to Las Vegas. I took a biography of Gertrude and Leo Stein and Jill took an Ondaatji novel, Divisadero. We laid by the pool and read. We ate. We slept like corpses. We even watched television. To keep our hearts from grinding to a halt we walked The Strip in the afternoons. We went to a play about Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. For four days we simmered in the synthetic sun of Las Vegas. We forgot who we were and we came away more rested than we have been in years. More rest, I’m afraid than this holiday after Thanksgiving will ever give me.

Las Vegas was good for us but on the fourth day I found myself fidgeting. At first I thought it was just that my batteries had been charged and I was ready to get back to work. But that wasn’t it. I really didn’t want to get back to work. It was just that I was missing something. My first clue came when I found myself staring out the ninth floor window of our hotel room at the distant, desert, mountains. I was curious about the mountains, but that wasn’t quiet what was bothering me. As I stared, I scanned the sky out of habit and it came to me: the sky was empty. I walked down to the pool and instead of settling in with Gertrude Stein, I walked the perimeter of the pool area. I left the book on the table beside Jill and walked out onto The Strip. I walked for an hour and a half and, although I found plenty of Las Vegas wild life, I saw no wildlife. It dawned on me that in four days I had not seen a rabbit, a squirrel, or a circling raptor. There were a few trees on the side streets but not a single bird. For nearly a week I had gone completely birdless. Not a crow, or a robin, or starling. Not a sparrow or even a pigeon. I needed to go home.

A few years ago a pair of house wrens took up residence on our deck. We don’t see many house wrens so I watched them carefully. I would see them fly past the window and, just as they went out of sight, their feet would swing up as if the bird was about to land. But when I walked outside to see where they landed, all I could see was the buffalo skull that hangs on the side of our house. The birds had vanished.

It took a week to understand that the couple had built a nest in the skull and was using the eye socket as a doorway. The nest itself was deep in the skull and they made their final entrance through what must be a sinus passage. It wasn’t long before the cats began to sit and wait for them to enter and leave the skull. They would come and go a hundred times a day and nearly every time they would have to dodge a leaping cat. It never seemed to bother the birds. Back and forth with nesting material, deak left, dodge right. Back and forth with food, deak right, dodge left.

We locked the cats up for a week at fledging time, so the clumsy babies were safe, but for the few weeks they used it, the wrens’ home was a place of serious tension. Sitting here in my sun-drenched chair, I think of those tiny wren hearts, beating a million miles per minute. Inside a buffalo skull it must be deafening. For a pair of wrens with cats waiting below, a buffalo skull must be a sort of pressure cooker. But it is still home. And even with that kind of pressure it must have been a good place to live. I close the book of poems but leave it in my lap. I look out the window and try to imagine that I am seeing the world through the eye socket of a buffalo.<–>