I once knew a way to count many things. In the fall there would be red and yellow leaves on the sidewalk and I could count each upturned star or crescent and all of the hidden potato bugs and ants scurrying beneath them. I could count the shingles on my neighbor’s roof or the number of crows on a telephone wire or the lights in the suburbs, just outside of the city. I could count the number of times the tallest building in the city flashed its blue light. The counting seemed to happen from a tall person’s perspective, because a tall person (or someone with access to a chair or a ladder) has enough perspective to count these types of things. And this counting occupied my thoughts; like the rhythm of a jump rope or feedback from my amp.
At some point the sky turned a little black and my mind became muddled with the future tense. You know in movies when you watch calendar pages flutter away and in the background there are amplified sounds of flapping wings and flashes of white paper? The flapping sound is desperate; not like the calculated movements of a large bird of prey responding to shifting air pressure.
Brilliantly, I try to escape these flapping birds (like Melanie Daniels in The Birds, but more clever and less skittish).
I start out at the top of a mountain, leaning against a conveniently positioned limestone slab, staring out at the Columbia, surrounded by brambles and Uva Ursi. I try to think about counting here. What if I could see the schools of fish beneath the black blue river, black dots fanning themselves around in patterns more complicated than I could understand.
Later it is raining in that way that draws thick ribbons down the windows, and I watch the black cat watch the rain. Counting raindrops is more complicated because one can quickly become two, or three can quickly become one, so your work requires split second calculations that can only occur if you are in a well-prepared state of mind. The problem is worsened when I ride the bus and water has leaked in and moves back and forth along the bottom of the window frame as the bus stops and starts down the darkened asphalt. One drop becomes a puddle in a matter of seconds, slipping back and forth in this black rubber crack.
In the end, all the pieces that I’ve been taught to break apart, to separate, to count, just move like water.
