In a fowl humor

I was out in the back yard burning trash when I noticed in the neighbor's hay-meadow a parliament of fowls worrying over some unfortunate carcass. Black vultures they were, with their white underwing tips and chain-mail-gray heads, an unusual bird at our house but quite common just an hour or so west. 

I feared at first that this encounter was a metaphor for my current situation: scrambling to keep the chaos under control while scavengers wait in the wings to carry off the scraps--and I'm not referring only to the Internal Revenue Service, although they certainly come to mind when the vultures start to circle. The vultures have come to nibble away at what little time, energy, and sanity remain after I figure out how to deliver my classes online despite unreliable technology, inadequate sleep, and no transportation whatsoever (because my son's car broke down last night--all the oil came spurting out when he tried to start the engine, which surely can't be anything serious, right?--so he's using mine until, well, whenever). 

But thinking about all the ways in which my life feels like a human sacrifice to ravenous scavengers just gets me down, so instead I'm wondering how Chaucer would have responded to the local influx of vultures. His Parlement of Fowles focused on far classier birds, of course, eagles mouthing cliches of courtly love on Valentine's Day; what would Chaucer do with vultures hovering over a nation in panic over an impending pandemic? That's an epic for a different kind of poet--maybe Shakespeare in full Lear mode or Cormac McCarthy channeling William Blake.

As for me, I've got nothing--not a rhyme, not a joke, not the slightest gesture that might transform the current chaos into some sort of sense. Trash is burning and vultures are circling and all I can do is stand over the fire wondering what's going to happen next.