89 Birds poems

I love to watch them sheathe themselves mid-air, shut wings and ride the light’s poor spine to earth, to touch down in gutters, in the rainbowed urine of suicides, just outside Bellevue’s walls. From in there the ransacked cadavers are carried up the East River to Potter’s Field as if they were an inheritance, gleaned of saveable parts, their diseases jarred and labeled, or incinerated, the ashes of metastisized vision professing the virus that lives beyond the flesh in air ... The first time I saw the inside of anything alive, a downed bird opened cleanly under my heel. I knelt to watch the spectral innards shine and quicken, the heart-whir magnify. And though I can’t say now what kind of bird it was, nor the season, spring or autumn, what dangerous transition, I have identified so many times that sudden earnest spasm of the throat in children, or in the jaundiced faces of the dying, the lower eye-lids straining upward. Fear needs its metaphors. I’ve read small helplessnesses make us maternal. Even the sparrows feel it, nesting this evening in traffic lights. They must have remembered, long enough to mate, woods they’ve never seen, but woods inbred up the long light of instinct, the streaked siennas of a forest floor born now into the city, the oak umbers, and the white tuft of tail feathers like a milkweed meadow in which their song, as Burroughs heard it, could be distinguished: come-come-where-where-all-together- down-the-hill ...

A heron-like species, rare visitors, most recent records referring to winter months . . . very active at dusk. —Guide to Irish Birds A sobering thought, the idea of you stretched there, bittern, under a dark sky, your exposed bones yellow too in a ditch among cold stones, ice glittering everywhere on bog and river, the whole unfortunate country frozen over and your voice stilled by enforced sobriety — a thought more wrenching than the fall of Troy because more intimate; for we’d hear your shout of delight from a pale patch of watery sunlight out on the mud there as you took your first drink of the day and now, destroyed by thirst, you lie in brambles while the rats rotate. I’d’ve broken the ice for you, given an inkling; now, had I known it, we might both be drinking and singing too; for ours is the same story. Others have perished — heron, blackbird, thrushes — and lie shivering like you under whin-bushes; but I mourn only the bittern, withdrawn and solitary, who used to carouse alone among the rushes and sleep rough in the star-glimmering bog-drain. It used to be, with characters like us, they’d let us wander the roads in wind and rain or lock us up and throw away the key — but now they have a cure for these psychoses as indeed they do for most social diseases and, rich at last, we can forget our pain. She says I’m done for if I drink again; so now, relieved of dangerous stimuli, as peace with my plastic bottle of H 2 O and the slack strings of insouciance, I sit with bronze Kavanagh on his canal-bank seat not in ‘the tremendous silence of mid-July’ but the fast bright zing of a winter afternoon dizzy with head-set, flash-bulb and digifone, to learn the tao he once claimed as his own and share with him the moor-hen and the swan, the thoughtless lyric of a cloud in the sky and the play of light and shadow on the slow commemorative waters; relax, go with the flow.

The Brent geese fly in long low wavering lines on their migrations. They start in western Europe, fatten in Iceland, then fly over the Greenland ice cap to Canada. They sometimes breed on the Arctic coasts of central and western Siberia and winter in western Europe, some in England, the rest in Germany and France. What I have to offer here is nothing revolutionary. They learn the map from their parents, or through culture rather than through genetics. It is just an observation, a small observation that sometimes art can hold the oil wars and all that they mean and might yet mean within. Just as sometimes there are seven stanzas in a song. And just as sometimes there is a refrain between each stanza. And just as often this sort of song tells a certain sort of story, one about having something and then losing it. Just as sometimes the refrain of a song is just one word said four times. Just as sometimes the word is huge, sometimes coming from a machine and yet hitting in the heart; uplifting and ironic and big enough to hold all these things in its four syllables. Just as some- times, often even, it contradicts, and thus works with, the stanzas. Just as the police clear out yet another public space and yet another camera follows along behind. Just as the stream has no narration, only ambient noise. And the police move slowly, methodically in a line as if they are a many-legged machine. They know what they are doing. It is their third time clearing the park and they will clear it many more times and then they will win and a building will be built where there once was the park. In this song, as is true of many songs, it is unclear why the singer has lost something, maybe someone. In this time, the time of the oil wars, there are many reasons that singers give for being so lost. Often they are lost because of love. Sometimes they are lost because of drugs. Sometimes they have lost their country and in their heart it feels as if they have lost something big. And then sometimes they are lost just because they are in Bakersfield. Really though they are lost because in this time song holds loss. And this time is a time of loss. The police know, as they move through the park yet one more time, that they will win and a building will be built on the space. But right now, the building is not there. All that is there are the police and debris and the police deal with the debris. They push over book- shelves, open up boxes and look inside, tear into tents, awkwardly, the poles springing. They are only there to see if any humans remain. Tomorrow the bulldozers will push the debris into big piles and load it into trucks. The police wear white helmets and short sleeves under their kevlar vests. For many years the Brent geese ate eelgrass, but once the eelgrass was gone to the wasting disease and the estuaries filled, they moved inland to agricultural lands and began eating grasses and winter-sown cereals. The Brent geese are social, adaptable. They fly around together, learning from each other, even as these groups are often unstable, changing from season to season. Songs in their most popular versions tend to be epiphanic, gorgeous with swelling chord changes, full of lament too. And this song, like many, expresses the desire to be near someone who is now lost. It travels as something layered, infiltrated, unconfused with its refusals to make a simple sense. I want to give you this song sung in a bar in Oakland one night during the ongoing oil wars. The singer had clearly been lost once, but they sang as someone who eventually got in the car and drove out of Bakersfield, perhaps early in the morning, the sun just starting to rise, or perhaps later after sun-up, the light washing out everything in Bakersfield as the sun is wont to do there. Eventually they arrived to sing this song. This might have taken them many years. There was nothing that implied that the lostness was recent. But the lostness, it was clear, was huge and had been experienced fully by them. It probably doesn't matter where the sun was that day in Bakersfield when they got in the car. It probably just matters that there is a sun, still, and they got in the car and drove, drove through the oil fields with their wells pumping out amber colored oils and their refineries with tall towers that heat the oil so as to sort its various viscosities, and drove through the black cloud that is the slow constant burn of the oil wars. Then at some point they were in Oakland. The oil near Bakersfield is heavy but it often benchmarks against the Brent blend. Brent blend is a light crude oil, though not as light as West Texas Intermediate. It contains approximately 0.37% of sulphur, classifying it as sweet crude, yet not as sweet as West Texas Intermediate. When the park is cleared and the building is built, it will headquarter an oil company. When this oil company named their oil fields off the coast of Scotland, they choose the names of water birds in alphabetical order: Auk, Brent, Cormorant, Dunlin, Eider, Fulmar, and so on. Brent is also an acronym for the Jurassic Brent formation that makes up the Brent oilfield, for Broom, Rannoch, Etive, Ness, and Tarbert. About two thirds of oil is benchmarked against what is called the Brent Crude Oil Spot price. Petroleum suppliers in Europe, Africa and the Middle East often price their oil according to Brent Crude's value on the Interconti- nential Exchange if it is being sold to the West. The Brent Crude Oil Spot price is set in dollars, maintained by force, endlessly manipulated by commodity futures markets. The refrain is the moment when the singer makes it clear that they understand something about what is being lost. It was obvious they had lost their country, it being taken over by bankers and all. They had clearly been rejected. Loved too much and gotten too little of it back in return, many times. But none of this matters, it was obvious, in comparison to what is now being lost for that night even though the song is about a minor loss, about the loss of tongue on clit or cock, the singer seemed to understand s0mething about the other things that are lost. While a formation of police clear the far side of the park of the debris of its occupation, another forma- tion of police on the other side shoot the new gasses, the ones we do not yet know by name, into another part of the park where people are now clustered. This camera  has sound and every few seconds there is a pop. It is unevenly steady. The song is just about two people who are not near each other, who have probably chosen not to be near each other any more. The song reflects and refracts the oil in ways both relevant and trivial in how it tells about what happens when one lets love go, when one gives up the tongue. It might be that only through the minor we can feel enormity. It might be that there is nothing to epiphany if it does not hint at the moment of sweaty relation larger than the intimate. For what is epiphanic song if it doesn't spill out and over the many that are pulled from intimacies by oil's circulations? The truckers, the sailors and deckhands, the assembly line workers, those who maintain the pipelines, those who drive support in the caravans that escort the tankers, the fertilizers, the thousands of interlocking plastic parts, the workers who move two hundred miles and live in a dorm near a factory, alone, those on the ships who spend fifty weeks circulating with the oil unable to talk to each other because of no shared language and so are left only with two weeks in each year where they can experience the tongue in meaningful conversation. A life that is only circulations. Before the police come, before the building, in the middle of one night, a group of people form a line leading to the entrance of the park. Or several groups form several lines, all leading to the entrance. Some wear medical masks. Some wear glasses too. All pass bricks, one by one, down the line so as to make a pile. They are silent for the most part, silent enough that it is possible to hear the bricks make a clink as they fall. The pile gets bigger and bigger. It is waist high. Then chest high. Some get out of the line and climb on the pile, hold both their hands in the air because they know now is the transitory, momentary triumph and it should be felt. Others continue passing brick after brick, from one hand to another hand, arms extended, torsos at moments also going back and forth with the bricks. When they run out of bricks, the pile is topped with fencing. Then they gather behind it, waiting. Back there, some- one might possibly be singing to a child, singing the epiphanic song that alludes to losing the moment of tongue on clit or cock over and over because the child cannot be comforted, because the singer knows only loss. The room will be dark. The light will be on in the hall. There will be shadows, in other words. And the singer will know about these shadows at this moment and know they had agreed to be with shadows when they had the child. They had gambled in a sense on a question of sustaining. They had agreed to exist from now on with a shadow. A shadow of love and a shadow of the burning of the oil fields that has already happened and is yet to come and yet must come and a million other shadows that might possibly disappear in the light at that moment.

They've been so long above it all, those two petals so steeped in style they seem to stall in the kettle simmering over the town dump or, better still, the neon-flashed, X-rated rump of fresh roadkill courtesy of the interstate that Eisenhower would overtake in the home straight by one horsepower, the kettle where it all boils down to the thick scent of death, a scent of such renown it's given vent to the idea buzzards can spot a deer carcass a mile away, smelling the rot as, once, Marcus Aurelius wrinkled his nose at a gas leak from the Great Sewer that ran through Rome to the Tiber then went searching out, through the gloam, one subscriber to the other view that the rose, full-blown, antique, its no-frills ruff, the six-foot shrug of its swing-wings, the theologian's and the thug's twin triumphings in a buzzard's shaved head and snood, buzz-buzz-buzzy, its logic in all likelihood somewhat fuzzy, would ever come into focus, it ever deign to dispense its hocus-pocus in that same vein as runs along an inner thigh to where, too right, the buzzard vouchsafes not to shy away from shite, its mission not to give a miss to a bête noire, all roly-poly, full of piss and vinegar, trying rather to get to grips with the grommet of the gut, setting its tinsnips to that grommet in the spray-painted hind's hindgut and making a sweeping, too right, a sweeping cut that's so blasé it's hard to imagine, dear Sis, why others shrink from this sight of a soul in bliss, so in the pink from another month in the red of the shambles, like a rose in over its head among brambles, unflappable in its belief it's Ararat on which the Ark would come to grief, abjuring that Marcus Aurelius humbug about what springs from earth succumbing to the tug at its heartstrings, reported to live past fifty, as you yet may, dear Sis, perhaps growing your hair in requital, though briefly, of whatever tears at your vitals, learning, perhaps, from the nifty, nay thrifty, way these buzzards are given to stoop and take their ease by letting their time-chastened poop fall to their knees till they're almost as bright with lime as their night roost, their poop containing an enzyme that's known to boost their immune systems, should they prong themselves on small bones in a cerebral cortex, at no small cost to their well-being, sinking fast in a deer crypt, buzzards getting the hang at last of being stripped of their command of the vortex while having lost their common touch, they've been so long above it all.

I Among twenty snowy mountains, The only moving thing Was the eye of the blackbird. II I was of three minds, Like a tree In which there are three blackbirds. III The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds. It was a small part of the pantomime. IV A man and a woman Are one. A man and a woman and a blackbird Are one. V I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling Or just after. VI Icicles filled the long window With barbaric glass. The shadow of the blackbird Crossed it, to and fro. The mood Traced in the shadow An indecipherable cause. VII O thin men of Haddam, Why do you imagine golden birds? Do you not see how the blackbird Walks around the feet Of the women about you? VIII I know noble accents And lucid, inescapable rhythms; But I know, too, That the blackbird is involved In what I know. IX When the blackbird flew out of sight, It marked the edge Of one of many circles. X At the sight of blackbirds Flying in a green light, Even the bawds of euphony Would cry out sharply. XI He rode over Connecticut In a glass coach. Once, a fear pierced him, In that he mistook The shadow of his equipage For blackbirds. XII The river is moving. The blackbird must be flying. XIII It was evening all afternoon. It was snowing And it was going to snow. The blackbird sat In the cedar-limbs.

Tossed on the glittering air they soar and skim, Whose voices make the emptiness of light A windy palace. Quavering from the brim Of dawn, and bold with song at edge of night, They clutch their leafy pinnacles and sing Scornful of man, and from his toils aloof Whose heart's a haunted woodland whispering; Whose thoughts return on tempest-baffled wing; Who hears the cry of God in everything, And storms the gate of nothingness for proof.

There is health in thy gray wing, Health of nature’s furnishing. Say, thou modern-winged antique, Was thy mistress ever sick? In each heaving of thy wing Thou dost health and leisure bring, Thou dost waive disease and pain And resume new life again.

Whither, 'midst falling dew, While glow the heavens with the last steps of day, Far, through their rosy depths, dost thou pursue Thy solitary way? Vainly the fowler’s eye Might mark thy distant flight, to do thee wrong, As, darkly seen against the crimson sky, Thy figure floats along. Seek’st thou the plashy brink Of weedy lake, or marge of river wide, Or where the rocking billows rise and sink On the chaféd ocean side? There is a Power, whose care Teaches thy way along that pathless coast,— The desert and illimitable air Lone wandering, but not lost. All day thy wings have fanned, At that far height, the cold thin atmosphere; Yet stoop not, weary, to the welcome land, Though the dark night is near. And soon that toil shall end, Soon shalt thou find a summer home, and rest, And scream among thy fellows; reeds shall bend, Soon, o’er thy sheltered nest. Thou’rt gone, the abyss of heaven Hath swallowed up thy form, yet, on my heart Deeply hath sunk the lesson thou hast given, And shall not soon depart. He, who, from zone to zone, Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight, In the long way that I must trace alone, Will lead my steps aright.

O blithe New-comer! I have heard, I hear thee and rejoice. O Cuckoo! shall I call thee Bird, Or but a wandering Voice? While I am lying on the grass Thy twofold shout I hear; From hill to hill it seems to pass, At once far off, and near. Though babbling only to the Vale Of sunshine and of flowers, Thou bringest unto me a tale Of visionary hours. Thrice welcome, darling of the Spring! Even yet thou art to me No bird, but an invisible thing, A voice, a mystery; The same whom in my school-boy days I listened to; that Cry Which made me look a thousand ways In bush, and tree, and sky. To seek thee did I often rove Through woods and on the green; And thou wert still a hope, a love; Still longed for, never seen. And I can listen to thee yet; Can lie upon the plain And listen, till I do beget That golden time again. O blessèd Bird! the earth we pace Again appears to be An unsubstantial, faery place; That is fit home for Thee!

For Detroit There are birds here, so many birds here is what I was trying to say when they said those birds were metaphors for what is trapped between buildings and buildings. No. The birds are here to root around for bread the girl’s hands tear and toss like confetti. No, I don’t mean the bread is torn like cotton, I said confetti, and no not the confetti a tank can make of a building. I mean the confetti a boy can’t stop smiling about and no his smile isn’t much like a skeleton at all. And no his neighborhood is not like a war zone. I am trying to say his neighborhood is as tattered and feathered as anything else, as shadow pierced by sun and light parted by shadow-dance as anything else, but they won’t stop saying how lovely the ruins, how ruined the lovely children must be in that birdless city.