Shelter In Place
By Tina Cane
Schools are shuttered everything is cancelled and my body has become
an extension of my house this shift is strange but not entirely unfamiliar
the way a cardinal’s home is a disordered stick bomb just about captures
how I feel
how the mother bird uses her shape as a template to form her nest
shoving sticks together in a fit of random engineering randoming would be
the verb I guess or jamming as it applies to me
a steady state of hysteresis
in which applied pressure changes the ensemble in which the structure
bounces back but not completely
I’ve been thinking
of ways to speak to my children about fear how to be adaptive
I want to tell them about zebra finches who are content in captivity
and who unlike robins which favor mud as cement make their nests
from anything they find strips of paper or string fibers from a coconut husk
I want to stress that these elements the finches assemble seem haphazardly
placed but behave collectively how there’s a logic buried deep in the mother
building her nest which is a story of the nature of her body as every child’s
first home that we don’t struggle alone as the architects of our days
that nature will continue to amaze us in ways we don’t expect