The life of, statistically, all wrens goes unrecorded.

Yet a wren hops across the metal roof of the sunroom in search of tasty insects (not, however, the large beetle that was slowly traipsing through the leaf debris of the forest floor next to our driveway earlier this afternoon), feeding the tiny chicks out of their shells in the coconut hull lined planter hanging below the eave of the house where a dead tree fell in the last windstorm and crushed the gutter, scattering the bird and rolling the tiny wren eggs out of the nest and into the edge of the planter which I pulled down and rolled the eggs back into the makeshift nest a few weeks ago and rehung.

The crushed gutter looks like a kid with a busted lip, pouting.

The tree I sawed apart the next day in good time. A modern Paul Bunyan I’m not. Daniel Boone or David Crockett, neither. The rope-thick trunk of a poison ivy vine that once adorned the dead tree is draped across the back deck like a snake lying in wait for the wren, its limbs and dead seeds like some macabre sepulchral being slithering out of the primordial ooze and into the civilised landscape of modern culture where Colin Quinn gives an oratory on the long historic short of our species from a comedic perspective in lower Manhattan.

I give the wren credit. It sure is careful when it approaches a nest out in the open, acting like it’s being watched at all times, from any direction. You know, like reclusive survivalists of our species in their natural environs.

Instinct or carefully-honed habit of life in the wilds of [sub/ex]urban woodland?

No matter.

Clouds gather, like clouds tend to do, on the horizon, foreboding doom, death and destruction.

Bells toll for the insects gulped down by illiterate, nonhistoric wren chicks.

Death is life.

Chinese rockets can blast nuclear warheads or people into space, the latter of more importance this week while the first female taikonaut gets her own water closet in Earth orbit.

The wren cannot comprehend rockets, spacesuits, weightlessness or any other joy besides the duty of feeding its young.

The wren does not know about Mercury rising or rising mercury in barometers, rare earth, or how rare Earth’s atmosphere is.

The two natural gas powered outdoor barbecue grills under cover below the wren’s nest are as meaningful as the house that hosts the smorgasbord of meals for the continuation of the wren’s family tree.

No matter.

A woman transfers freshly-dead fish onto a donkey cart with the help of an old man whose only interest is getting more for his share of the fish than what he would have received for the shipment of Salvia divinorum he had dug up earlier that morning and dumped out of the cart at the woman’s urging.

“Nobody wants your worthless weeds, old man!” she had spat at him in disgust.

No matter.

He did not need the money. He was happy for the companionship of the young woman, the first person of the opposite sex to talk to him in many months.

He remembered a quote from a book written in English by James Allen, given to him by the parish priest to encourage learning, “Until thought is linked with purpose there is no intelligent accomplishment.”

Whatever this woman wants must be important, the old man thought, like the insects that give their lives for a few wrens hosting a variety of insects on their bodies observed by an invisible author, all having the chance to reproduce themselves genetically, the transformation of their states of energy part of the zero-sum business of the universe.