In a volume of his American Ornithology, pioneering naturalist Alexander Wilson described a flock of Passenger Pigeons that he had witnessed in the early 1800s as the birds flew between Kentucky and Indiana. The flock, Wilson estimated, numbered 2,230,272,000 birds. “An almost inconceivable multitude,” he wrote, “and yet probably far below the actual amount.” The multitude spanned a mile wide and extended for some 240 miles, consisting of no fewer than three pigeons per cubic yard of sky… if Wilson’s flock had flown beak to tail in a single file the birds would have stretched around the earth’s equatorial circumference 22.6 times… With their powerful chests and long, quick-snapping wings, the pigeons flew an average of 60 miles per hour for hours at a time. Sometimes the swift and seemingly endless flocks stretched across the entire dome of sky, so that wherever one looked, horizon or zenith or somewhere between, there flew the pigeons.  They closed over the sky like an eyelid.

On any clear night, under a dark enough sky, we can see shooting stars. We wish upon them, even if we don’t quite know what they are—of course they’re not really stars—and even if we don’t know where they come from or what they might tell us about the universe. It’s as if we’re eager to pin our chances on something strange and sudden, something beautiful beyond our ken. Across cultures and time, we have written ourselves into the sky. We create constellations, transforming the random spatter of stars into shapes and stories. We name planets after gods. And we associate meteors and meteorites—the light of dust or rocks burning passage through the air, and the stones, after such fire, that sometimes fall to Earth—with the most elemental aspects of our lives: good luck, ill fortune, and even death.

And so I sing to you.

I sing how we are pollen walking.

I sing April, I sing summer and late September, I sing the sex of flowers and trees that lands on our cotton shirts and summer dresses, on our skin and hair, and how we breathe them in, the beautiful provocations: the lanky engineer, the new med student.  I sing the lazuli bunting, thimbleberry and columbine. I sing the growing slickness of your skin. I sing marmot, mountain nine bark and lupine. Spheres and folds, spikes and creases, stem and root.

I sing how syllables are songs, stories, too, for the deep beginnings of the word pollen, and I love this, mean “dust” and “meal.”

What we become, what we need along the way.

Several times a day Granny Lin bathes Old Tang: in the morning and before bedtime, and whenever he wets or dirties himself. The private bathroom is what Granny Lin likes best about her marriage. For all her life, she has used public bathrooms, fighting with other slippery bodies for the lukewarm water drizzling from the rusty showers. Now that she has a bathroom all to herself, she never misses any chance to use it.

Our bodies freeze. We look at the boy’s face. Even with his swollen face and black eyes, we have no problem telling that he has the face of the dictator, young and rebellious, just as in the illustrations in the books about the dictator’s heroic childhood. The boy stands up and limps to his mother. We look at his face in awe, not daring to move when he spits bloody phlegm at our feet.

“Remember this face,” the boy says. “You will have to pay for this one day.”

A rocket scientist, Mr. Shi tells people when they ask about his profession in China. Retired, he then adds, out of modesty, when people marvel. Mr. Shi learned the phrase from a woman during a layover at Detroit, when he tried to explain to her his work, drawing pictures when his English failed to help. ‘A rocket scientist!” the woman exclaimed, laughing out loud.

I show Hanky Panky the design that I adapted from a photo in a book of Dayak art, and he has me take off my shirt and he sketches the design on my collarbone with a grease pencil. Then he calls over an assistant to shave my chest. Now, under other circumstances, this could be kind of a turn-on. But in Hanky Panky’s tattoo parlor it justs reminds me of the shaving I had to undergo before some surgery I once had in the groin region. That one, much to my initial disappointment, had been performed by a male nurse, although actually I did see the wisdom of having a man for the job at around the time he began to whisk the razor around my balls. “Hey, be careful. Please!” I begged. And my male nurse answered, “Don’t worry, buddy. I’ll handle ‘em like they were my own.”

But inside the warehouse there are rows of pews. And every pew is filled with junkies. There are black junkies and Anglo junkies and Latino junkies. There are twelve-year-old boys sniffling from their first training-wheel habits and stooped veterans with hands like waterlogged sponges, those hands that everyone calls “New York mittens.” There are fashion models with the faces of drowsy angels who’ve been chauffeured down from townhouses in the East Sixties and who’ll powder their tracks with Lancome before the next day’s photo shoot. There are cadaverous, crookbacked junkies who’ve crawled from beneath rain-soaked packing crates in Tompkins Square Park and whose bodies are gruesome exempla of their disease: every vein collapsed, every limb cratered, eyes jaundiced, teeth rotten, dicks gone flaccid as the peeled shrimp in a fishmonger’s window—the kind of junkies you always look at and think, At least I’m not that bad.

Here are the benefits of being alone and celibate:

You can read all night and no one will nag you to turn off the light.

You can go to Borneo on the spur of the moment without anyone wanting to know when you’ll be back.

You can prepare meals so disgusting you’d be ashamed to eat them in company: Grill a slice of bologna till it curls up at the edges; fill the cup with baked beans; then top with a slice of Kraft American cheese and broil till melted. Serve with dill pickle and sliced tomato.

You can fart to your heart’s content without having to say “Excuse me,” though you may grow so accustomed to this that you find yourself doing it in public places—on the line at your savings bank, for instance – and getting nasty looks from strangers.

… On bad nights you can scoop up your cats and cuddle them shamelessly, even kissing them on the nose, though they usually dislike this and will try to shove you away with their paws. If worse comes to worst, you can press your face against their bodies and weep copiously into their fur.

I've lurked in chat rooms with discussion threads devoted to such subjects as “A previously unknown Albert Goodell brace found in the wild.” One sweltering summer morning, on the Jay County fairgrounds in the farming village of Portland, Indiana, I walked among fabulous machines as small as schnauzers and as huge as elephants, all gleaming in the August sun. Drive belts whirred, flywheels revolved, pistons fired, and a forest of smokestacks piped foul smoke and rude music into the otherwise cloudless sky. Mostly, I have ridden a Midwestern circuit of flea markets and farm auctions in the passenger seat of an emerald green Toyota pickup truck piloted by a fifty-five-year-old botanist with a ponytail, spectacles like windowpanes, and a beard verging on the Whitmanesque.

In the depths of the Great Depression, the peak had become home to the largest cross on Earth, a 103-foot-tall monstrosity of concrete and steel. Some 50,000 San Franciscans had gathered for the dedication ceremony, held March 24, 1934, at the summit. Far away in Washington, D.C., at precisely 7:30 P.M. Pacific Standard Time, President Roosevelt depressed the golden key of his executive telegraph, an electric signal leapt the continent, and atop Mount Davidson the cross, lit from below by twelve 1,000-watt lamps, blazed into the night sky like a flaming sword. It would continue to glow, a lunar presence on the San Francisco skyline, off and on for the next forty-two years, until 1976, when—except for a few days at Christmas and Easter—the national energy crisis extinguished it.

With careless hands a child kills an ant. Flies are far trickier, though once caught, they have little chance. And, if darting birds don’t grab them first, butterflies die natural deaths; few people—collectors excepted—willfully still such tremulous beauty.

Flies, St. Augustine wrote, were invented by God to punish man for his arrogance. Was that what the people of Hamburg were supposed to feel in 1943 as they stumbled through the smoldering ruins of their city during the pauses between Allied bombing raids? Flies—“huge and iridescent green, flies such as had never been seen before”—were so thick around the corpses in the air-raid shelters that, across the floors writhing with maggots, the work-teams detailed to collect the dead could reach the bodies only with flamethrowers.

And then, at the instant the referee directed the trainers to prepare their crickets, silence snapped into place, the room seemed to hold its breath. The two trainers began again to gently stroke their animals with the yard grass (back legs, abdomen, jaws). The crickets remained motionless. If you were close enough, you could see the beating of their hearts.