Going nowhere, going backwards, standing still

A few years ago I came upon the delicate corpse of a mourning dove while out for a jog along a farm road. It was no longer a bird, but a thing—smooth and still and grey like a faded, misshapen aluminum can. I could not bring myself to touch its smallness, its cavernous deadness, but for some reason, I had to take it with me. Perhaps I could understand its odd power by drawing it, preserving it in the flash of iris and pencil. So I trotted the rest of the way home and drove back to the place in my van as the sun set.

I scooped up the bird the way people scoop dog-doo, my hand swathed in a triple layer of plastic grocery bags. Then a tidy knot, another, and into the freezer it went, right next to the peas.

For some reason I think of this as I drive the massive bridge over the Missouri River, somewhere in the scrolling flatness of South Dakota. My boyfriend sits beside me—we are taking a road trip to say goodbye before a winter of separation. Looking out at the water’s pewter surface—swirled looping and lazy past massive sandbars, rubbing through the comb of bridge supports—I feel the sad tug of impermanence. I have been reading about the force of glaciers, the persistent action of water, and it seems I can feel the river tearing the earth, the bridge—everything—seaward.

From where does this vast river flow? I picture slabby, mountainous places with clinging aspens, brief brilliant gold leaves that fade to black and fall in the wind, rot and disintegrate in the water. All the bones of things wearing down—smooth and white like riverstone, or pulpy like forest mulch—and then nothing but a whisper of powder, a spindrift on the ocean floor. Morbid thoughts, maybe.

But I feel a sweetness in this—the evening light on our faces, the preciousness of small things. His knuckles on the gearshift, the bugspatter on the windshield, peanuts. We are a quick, hot breath, a leaf flicker, a bird. And so we spin east, away from the setting sun, so fast we are going nowhere, going backwards, standing still. The night will bury us and the morning will greet us.