Incubation

by Aoife Wren

In the deep rimmed bowl of her woven stick nest, high up in the broken flat top of an opened out pine, the golden eagle incubates. A branch, the curved crook of an arm, stretches out behind her, away above the petering edge of a forest far below, above the open, tawny, still-wintered moor beyond.
A slight breeze moves a twig-caught whisp of down. Her head crouches low, her feathers slick-press against her neck.  She is crying, a loud repeated mournful yelp as her black eye, round and unbroken by light, watches from behind the deep curved dome of unbreakable smoothness that is her bill.  The sky is empty beyond her. The moor is still. She is waiting, way above the rest of the forest, on a launch pad, a landing pad, a nest.  She is crying, her slight head-moving cry and the blonde feathers of her neck ruffle in the breeze, as her head begins to turn, over her shoulder towards the space behind her. When he lands, on the offered crook of the branch, its uneven bridge a motion of dancing needles, she is facing him.  She knew, she knew he was coming.

The instant his talons close around the branch, her calls quicken but begin to quieten. Passive, aside her calling, her body is mute. His has the lightness of sky in its feathers, though they close and smooth around it.  How fleeting his landing, how sudden his air-filled arrival behind her.  And the lightness of flight, an exhilaration, is in the way he leaps again, closer, to land at the edge of the nest’s rim. Its sacred circle stills him.  His head turns slightly towards her. In his bill, he carries a slim and tender twig and at its tip, a tiny spray of fresh pine needles hang. He steps closer and gently lays it on the nest beside her.  Her head pulls further down and the feathers of her neck open to a ruff of darkening spaces, her crying quieter still, the closer he has come.  The breath of pause ripens between them and while he steals brief glances towards her, to the tight weave of twig and stick, they share the space of the nest again.  He is cowed now and she is frozen, a spell, a dwam, a dreaming holds.  The daze of incubation.  
Wait, wait. The light of air is leaving him, softening him.  The weight of nest subduing him, soothing him.  It is wooing him.  He makes a tiny bow towards it, a step into its ring and perhaps it is the leaving lightness of flight that rouses her, the smell of it loosened from his breast. With a ruffle of feathers her body rises, on thick feathered stretching legs and releases her. Air rushes into the broken vacuum as she steps back onto yellowed feet, head dropping to survey her anchor, the bright perfect rounds of her two white eggs. In a moment, with each leg pulled waveringly high, the point of black curved talon glinting, she steps over them in an exaggeration of avoiding, she is clear of them and with the spread of her wings, lifts.  She is hopping onto the nests rim, onto the curled crook of encircling arm, to the sky’s edge. To the lightness of flight and dropping away. The sound of her unpausing cry goes with her, its rhythm a pulse, a heartbeat. It fades and falters. Is gone.

He is left in an invisible sphere of emptied silence.  The moment she stood up to reveal the eggs, he began his movement towards them. Their gravity pulls him, head lowered, each step a quivering brim-full of hesitancy, of inevitability.  He is transfixed in an unerring reverie, with a trepidation that is breath taking.  The air filled is earth bound, even here, raised on his altar above all others.  His feet touch earth, his weight is taken and as if in horror of their holiness, he advances, with a care that is as profound as any ever seen, to the smooth white centre of the eggs. His aloneness in that sacred space is startling. His silence.  He lifts the sharpness of points that have cut through and squeezed the life from so many to be what he is, as if they were impotent, numbed, dream-filled appendages.  Each careful lift, a softened droopiness he lays numbly down, approaching closer, closer, one tiny step at a time, until the yellow wrinkled skin of his feet, touches the smooth white of the eggs’ side.

He bows forward, towards them, and with the needle point of his scooped bill that is almost the depth of his head, he picks up a tiny twig from the edge of an egg and places it, carefully to the side.  He nudges the belly of each egg and rolls it a tiny fraction outwards.  He tips forward above them, so that the flat of feathered chest and belly hangs and opens into warm patterned fringes of dangling feather curtains.  He sinks their downy softness down and around the white of eggs and their starkness dissolves into disbelief. Carefully, so carefully, he settles over them and a soft rocking of his body begins.  Lullaby, side to side, the tips of his wings pressing past each other, each pale edged feather rustling, ruffling, lowering around them, and his neck sinks and his head, until he is forehead pressed, deeper and deeper into the cup of the nest at the edge of the rim.  His eyes, his bill are hidden and the rocking continues for a time that is long enough to make a heart pour open.  Like the profoundest of love, like a longed for return, like prayer, like worship. Like the deepest of need, like submission, like grief, like acceptance. Like listening, with everything that is, to the first tiny stirrings of life within.

I am here. I am here. Know me.