Poecile atricapillus
by Benjamin Toche
an excerpt from Poecile atricapillus,
itself an excerpt from The Birder
He lay in the springtime hammock in the chill of the glacial sloughing breeze that shook down the valley mouth and swayed him in his rough knit cocoon. Overhead the blue of the cerulean dome winked in and out between the hypertight green of the paper birch buds. His children played some distance away on what passed for his lawn, more like a barely tamed patch
of nugget bluegrass into which tumors of beds sent their metastatic creepers - bulbed flowers (peonies, lilies, crocuses), lilac bushes, lupines, forget-me-nots. There were three of them, the boys, ranging from 12 to 2 years, the two oldest on unprecedented early school vacation for an extended summer. The man listened to their play as he watched two chickadees inspect the recently erected and unpainted or stained bird box lashed to the trunk of one of the birches which
tethered his hammock.