A Grackle Calls

The sound of a pebble as it rises,
raucously scraping the sides
of a musical pipe filling with water:
this sound and no other
--the call of the grackle--
awakened me,
from outside the window.

Before my eyes could react, my ears dominated sensory input
and resuscitated associations:
the window would open out from the middle,
onto a sunny but chilly crystal morning framed by rows of arches,
and the volcano lovers hovering above.
The grackles would surely be strutting around the little lake.
Juan and I could hurry past the playita to breakfast and chow on chilaquiles.
Where was my spiral notebook with my notes for Antropología de México class?
Would I happen upon that amiga especial today?

Twenty-one years later,
the pebble-riding pitch-rising
call of the grackle
sounded again,
and my eyelids retracted.
I was not in bed in the Dormitorio de Hombres at the Universidad de las Américas in Cholula.
I was in bed in my house in Tulsa, Oklahoma,
where I have lived for eight years
with that amiga especial
without once hearing
a zanate.

Had the zanate lost its way,
becoming, at some latitudinal checkpoint,
a grackle?

I tossed the blankets and stumbled to the window,
which opens up,
not out,
and found a wintry morning still wrapped
in its own blankets of fog.
I saw no bird.

Some illusioned philanthropist later informed me
that great-tailed grackles are common in Texas
and have been seen as far north as Iowa.
But these are mere ornithological observations.
That scrannel grackle's
disembodied cackle
was a message sent to me from Puebla,
over the borders of many states on either side of la frontera,
carrying far and loud across the foggy sea of sky.

And the message was a call
to recall.