Field Notes for a Vanishing Season

A field notebook swells with dates and measurements, the exact angle of light at 4 p.m. on the third of March, the weight of a sparrow pressed flat in common Latin. Science is the practice of insisting that a thing can be held. But the season I am trying to map shifts while I am writing it down— the meadow turns before I've named its grasses, the bird I almost catalogued becomes a different bird. I fold my notes into the places I misremember, let the margins fill with what I meant to say: here the light did something I don't have a word for, here you stood, and then you didn't, and the space is not the same as where you were. What we call study is also a kind of grieving— the act of looking so carefully at something already passing that we almost believe our looking keeps it here.