The Pigeon Had an Agenda

June fourteenth. There was a pigeon on the fire escape this morning and I watched it for a long time. Not because it did anything. It did almost nothing, a slow quarter-turn, one foot lifted, a very long sideways look at something on the railing that I could not identify from my side of the glass. Then it stood there. I stood there too, on the other side, holding my coffee, becoming a person who had decided this was the thing happening right now.

At some point I sat down on the kitchen floor. I don't remember deciding to do that either. It was more comfortable to watch from there, I think, the angle less effortful. Gerald's vine was at about eye level from the floor, which I don't usually notice. The collapsed bowl was on the shelf above me catching a bit of light off the window. The cord was on the sill. Everything in its place, the same as always, and a pigeon outside doing its own separate accounting.

the subject of my forty minutes

I did photograph it, eventually. Through the glass, which meant the frame has a certain softness to it, the fire escape railing, the iridescent green at its throat, that very specific pigeon expression of general disdain for everything including its own location. The cord on the sill is soft in the foreground. I don't know what it is about summer mornings that makes you willing to just watch a thing. Maybe the light is slower. Maybe I am.

floor sitting. mug. bird. saturday.

It left without announcement, which felt like the appropriate ending. Forty minutes I gave that pigeon. I don't regret it. I've been thinking about the one-block run post, which went up in May, and Simone's sentence at the end of climbing about the two-buildings-later noticing, and I think the floor and the pigeon are in the same category. The body just settles into something and then the mind arrives later and says oh, we're doing this. The pigeon didn't know it had an audience. I didn't know I was going to sit on my kitchen floor on a Saturday morning in June and feel entirely fine about it. Here we both are.