“The sun never sets on the empire of the dandelion,” said Alfred Crosby, the historian of science and technology, talking about the biological expansion of Europe and the “portmanteau” of plants and animals carried by colonists to establish in new worlds.
The vibrant solar voice of the dandelion speaks for the global flow of species but some remain particular and personal. There is a voice inside my head and it’s not mine. The voice belongs to a song thrush. He began singing at the waxing moon, a couple of days before it was full, and sang until it began to wane. He would start at dawn from the topmost branch of one tree, then move to the topmost branch of another in the afternoon until the moon rose. Each day he did the same and his song followed the same patterns but never exactly: each phrase repeated three or four times, some sharp and yellow as celandines, some soft and blue as violets.
Song is the wrong word; the thrush laid a promise, a grimoire of magical objects cast into the sky, to bridge sunrise to moonrise, to go silently into woods of the night and then return to the fantastic idea that shook his body and mind each day. There is nothing more urgent than this, nothing that draws joy and pain through the public air until all delight is gone. “Birds are noisy,” says a voice behind the fence. The loudest voice raised against death, that’s his because (not that he needs one). Then he stopped. It was as if the air was exhausted and became too thin to carry him, until the midnight hailstorm.
The following morning, the thrush broke radio silence when there was a cool wave through trees and across gardens and fields on which to skim his oratory. Broadcasting in short durations, morning and evening, from different trees, sometimes missing a whole or most of the day, this was no longer the crazy obsessive. This was the voice returned as a bird, louder than blackbirds and robins but a thrush nevertheless, as bright and imperial as a dandelion.
