The sun is shining over Berlin today and I feel so glad of the blue it lights. All too soon it will be dark all the time, a world half-awake, candles staining fogged daylight windows and all the birds have flown except for ducks, pigeons, sparrows, swans. I wonder how it feels in the heart of a tiny brown bird, to cock your head on the grass and study the inner knowing that will bring you sweeping up into the slipstream to sail south, a sailing that’s more a machine, a relentless effort, the seamed world a faraway town under your belly feathers and your dream map: that you’re on the right path, that you have twelve days’ further of flying to go, eleven, eight, five, three. Imagine the chatter when everyone gets there first. Imagine the mournful little spaces here and there in the loud crowd of trees where one voice or another bird’s is missing, deleted by accidental death during the year or maybe simply falling out of the sky on the way over. Plummet. All labouring down the round world to beat the icy creep of winter, that consumes everything edible and buries all the seeds.
Birds know Berlin only in the sun. In Switzerland climbing a mountainside by steep red rail with its leather seats my friend said to me, in the dim clatter of the neck bells wooden-tongued and serene, the farmer can tell – if one of his cows is missing – he hears it from the herd in their song. Penguins find their young among twenty thousand birds all milling, every one screaming. I will search all winter for the one whose voice is silenced to me, out of my earshot, out of reach, a sweet subject I cannot leave alone like a sore tooth, a tree falling, a shot out of frame.