Correspondence

I could make this about genuine danger and how messages were tapped out in times of war and how that particular motion and even a bit of its sound reminds me of the Underwood you carried four blocks to the car for me in that town you don’t live in anymore. You said I owed you a drink in a lounge where jazz was played, but we never got around to that and now you reside elsewhere and are dating a woman who strokes your forearm over breakfast and I only ever hear from you twice a year.

          I’ve lost my train of thought—this being about these birds I recently read of that correspond in the shell. Not just heeding their mother’s warning call but each other, still snug, still days from cracking the casing that keeps everything dim but somewhat safe.

You and I are only children and spoke, then, of how important friends were because of. A kind of hunt for a sibling, someone who would answer their phone after midnight and help dig your car out after an overnight blizzard. Not that you did or that I did, but. We’d also talk of how shows featuring friends were unrealistic and all of it resembled how romantic relationships were depicted—the last-minute run and kiss in the rain. And yet. We kept trying to hear and be heard.

          Out of preservation, like these birds found on an island off the coast of Spain—halfway across a continent and all the way across an ocean.