Trophic Cascade. Camille T. Dungy

      Natural History

      The Rufous hummingbird builds her nest

      of moss and spider webs and lichen.

      I held one once—smaller than my palm,

      but sturdy. I would have told Mrs. Jeffers,

      from Court Street, if in those days of constant flights

      between California and Virginia I’d wandered

      into that Oakland museum. Any chance

      I could, I’d leave my rented house in Lynchburg.

      I hated the feeling of stuckness that old city’s humidity

      implied. You need to stop running away so much,

      Mrs. Jeffers would say when my visits were over

      and I leaned down to hug her. Why her words

      come to me, the woman dead for the better part

      of this new century, while I think of that

      nest of web and lichen, I cannot rightly say.

      She had once known my mother’s parents.

      The whole lot of them, even then, in their twenties,

      must already have been as old as God. They were

      black—the kind name for them in those days

      would have been Negroes—and the daily elections

      called for between their safety and their sanity

      must have torn even the strongest of them down.

      Mr. Jeffers had been a laborer. The sort, I regret,

      I don’t remember. He sat on their front porch

      all day, near his oxygen tank, waving occasionally

      to passing Buicks and Fords, praising the black

      walnut that shaded their yard. She would leave

      the porch sometimes to prepare their meals.

      I still have her yeast roll recipe. The best

      I’ve ever tried. Mostly, though, the same Virginian

      breeze that encouraged Thomas Jefferson’s

      tomatoes passed warmly through their porch eaves

      while we listened to the swing chains, and no one

      talked or moved too much at all. Little had changed

      in that house since 1952. I guess it’s no surprise

      they’d come to mind when I think of that cup

      of spider webs and moss, made softer by the feathers

      of some long-gone bird. She used to say, I like it

      right here where I am. In my little house. Here,

      with him. I thought her small-minded. In the winter,

      I didn’t visit very often. Their house was closed up

      and overheated. Everything smelled of chemical

      mothballs. She had plastic wrappers on the sofas

      and chairs. Everyone must have once

      held someone as old and small and precious as this.