I pass the feeder and yell, Grackle party! And then an hour later I yell, Mourning dove 
afterparty! (I call the feeder the party and the seed on the ground the afterparty.) I am getting 
so good at watching that I’ve even dug out the binoculars an old poet gave me back when I was 
young and heading to the Cape with so much future ahead of me it was like my own ocean. 
Tufted titmouse! I yell, and Lucas laughs and says, Thought so. But he is humoring me; he didn’t 
think so at all. My father does this same thing. Shouts out at the feeder announcing the party 
attendees. He throws out a whole peanut or two to the Steller’s jay who visits on a low oak 
branch in the morning. To think there was a time I thought birds were kind of boring. Brown 
bird. Gray bird. Black bird. Blah blah blah bird. Then, I started to learn their names by the ocean, 
and the person I was dating said, That’s the problem with you, Limón, you’re all fauna and no 
flora. And I began to learn the names of trees. I like to call things as they are. Before, the only 
thing I was interested in was love, how it grips you, how it terrifies you, how it annihilates and 
resuscitates you. I didn’t know then that it wasn’t even love that I was interested in but my own 
suffering. I thought suffering kept things interesting. How funny that I called it love and the 
whole time it was pain.