I went into the house and collected all the garbage that would burn and lugged it to the rusty old barrel beyond the apple trees. It was muddy, and with each step I thought, there’s something profound in this simplicity of carting used containers and old newspapers to the burning barrel. They lit easily, yellow flames opening like little shawls in which what they covered disappeared. I watched the cellophane that carried the perch all frozen from the sea. It dissolved to a clear shimmer that rose, as if the last motion of that fish rising for its hook was now being released. I watched the stories of brutality merge into smoke, saw the face of a child who’d been raped collapse into flame, saw her trust in anything join the shimmer of the perch. Saw the list of numbers we kept by the phone while Helen was dying curl, saw the doctor’s -2473 unlink and char. Saw it all rise in a clear flame that softened the sky. And there, through the suffered clarity that only burning what is gone can bring, I found myself staring at a hawk who was watching from his limb, as if knowing it would come to this. His beak wavered through the clear heat, which now seemed a window. His wings were almost fluid. He seemed an ounce of God’s elixir poured into the form of a keen bird, and I was glimpsing him just before he hardened into his life. I thought I saw the suffering, all burned and rising, coat the branch on which he stood. Through the flame, we were mirroring deeper parts of a larger self: he, the keen wing of memory hovering above the fire of all we have felt, and me, the hands of the future that must burn what can’t carry itself. Then he moved. Higher and to the left. Once out of the flame, his eyes were merely clear, no longer all-knowing. He flew away, a hawk. I walked away, a man.

After lunch, I looked for something birdlike to fix and settled on the bluebird houses, whose openings must face south. They must stand alone at the edge of a field or the birds will never show. I tried to hammer new boards to the backs of the houses in order to fasten them to fence posts. The hammering was delicate: too hard and the houses fell apart, not hard enough and the backings wouldn’t hold. I used old nails. They seemed more pliable. The houses once cleaned and backed were a bit rickety, but I trudged to the far end of the cow field and nailed them up as the cows thundered away. I stood and watched the oldest house pick up the wind, heard it enter the little bluebird hole and whip around inside.