89 Birds poems

For Ann Lauterbach Hemmed in by an un- tenable image: feathers planted below fragile branches of avian feet            scaly crossroads scoring a particular blue of sky offending through the uselessness of misplaced forms                       thorny prongs that make no sense (and yet belong) on the ground out of which the bird wings stiffly jut rigid as rhubarb leaf. Should you kneel the body's aged mechanism beneath the shade of dry feathers, should you angle the vulnerable cavern of ear—trembling passage to psyche's failures   our fall into suffering                           knowledge—toward the root should you listen you will hear the wasted strains of an underground song rising from the muffled beak: site of a perverse smothering throated core submerged deadened by thoughtless depths but alive for the dead have kept it safe from false music a ghoulish guard of LOVE SAFE from Psyche she who bullied by the cruelty of others the sophistication of fashionable libraries the envy of those who would molest the world into false confessions and banish                              all mystery with their dripping candles                   she who would unearth the birdsong                         to cage it she who                 will end by destroying what she loves most. Shhhh

This was more like the atmosphere had been pinched, whose chirp was an unexpected gust in a harmonium enough to break all that high horse talk that curdles the atmosphere. While centaurs ate grass and hurdled epitaphs, that chirp in the midst did change one of us. 'Twas clawed out in a feeling’s flock 'Twas 'couraged by the tall grass

Never the bark and abalone mask cracked by storms of a mastering god, never the gods’ favored glamour, never the pelagic messenger bearing orchards in its beak, never allegory, not wisdom or valor or cunning, much less hunger demanding vigilance, industry, invention, or the instinct to claim some small rise above the plain and from there to assert the song of another day ending; lentil brown, uncounted, overlooked in the clamorous public of the flock so unlikely to be noticed here by arrivals, faces shining with oils of their many miles, where it hops and scratches below the baggage carousel and lights too high, too bright for any real illumination, looking more like a fumbled punch line than a stowaway whose revelation recalls how lightly we once traveled.

Massive and black the frigate birds, on brambles in the distance. Their bright red gular sacs, full as spinnaker sails billow from their feathers, like giant hearts of skin and air. They remind us of our own hearts, oversized and awkward, quivering in the lightest wind.

for Boyce They are threatening to leave us          the nimble-throated singers the little murderers with the quick pulses They  perch at the ends of   bare branches          their tails are ragged and pitiful          the long green feathers are fallen out          They  go on eating and eating last autumn's yellow melia berries They do not care that you approach          cold corpses rot in the grass          in the reeds The gray-shouldered crows hobble about          the wren barely a mouthful          cocks her pert tail and threatens to slaughter the white-footed cat in the bushes They do not understand that they are dying They are threatening to leave us          how quickly we forget the way they taught us how to play our voices opening soul to weightlessness          like the Spartan poet singing under the burden of  his old bones to the chorus girls with their honey songs and their holy voices how he wished he could scoot like a kingfisher lightly over the flower of  the waves          who boasted I know the tunes of every bird but I Alcman found my words and song in the tongue of the strident partridge Where will we find songs          when the sleek-headed mallards are gone          who chase each other around the pond the reluctant duck and the lovesick drake The way she turns her head to the side to scold him whack  whack  whack  whack  whack the way her boyfriend chases off  his rival and then swims back reeb  reeb with feeble reassurances          the way he sits on top of  her          the way she flaps her wings to keep above water          the way they look pleased with themselves          wagging their tails          smoothing each feather back in its right place They are threatening to leave          but you may still catch them saying goodbye          stealthed in the cedar and cypress at dawn          in the dark clarity between sleep and waking A run of  five notes on a black flute another          and another          buried deep in the mix how many melodies can the air hold And what they sing          so lovely and so meaningless may urge itself  upon you          with the ache of   something  just beyond the point of  being remembered the trace of a brave thought in the face of sadness

A castaway blown south from the arctic tundra sits on a stump in an abandoned farmer’s field. Beyond the dunes cattails toss and bend as snappy as the surf, rushing and crashing down the jetty. His head a swivel of round glances, his eyes a deeper yellow than the winter sun, he wonders if the spot two hundred feet away is a mouse on the crawl from mud hole to deer-grass patch. An hour of wind and sleet whips the air, nothing darts or passes but the river underground. A North Pole creature shows us how to last. The wind ruffles his feathers from crown to claw while he gazes into zeroes the salt-slick rain. As a double-rainbow before us arcs sky and owl, we leave him surrendering to the echo of his white refrain.

The language of cranes we once were told is the wind. The wind is their method, their current, the translated story of life they write across the sky. Millions of years they have blown here on ancestral longing, their wings of wide arrival, necks long, legs stretched out above strands of earth where they arrive with the shine of water, stories, interminable language of exchanges descended from the sky and then they stand, earth made only of crane from bank to bank of the river as far as you can see the ancient story made new.

Every tripod- toting birder knows it never nests on urban girders. Even fences set its scalded-crimson head askew, its waddle swinging, wings akimbo. Few have got it on their lists and fewer still have caught it singing, this endangered North American candor, cousin of the done-in dodo, big-eyed Big Sur tremor- tenor — only ten or twenty hang glide over Modoc County, humbly numbered (as their days are) for us crazy crown- and throat- and belly-gazers. Any niche as fragile as a candor’s renders its extinction certain. We can sabotage its habitat with half a laugh or quarter murmur, fluster coveys worth of candors off their branches, which, abandoned, soon are little more than snarking- grounds for minor birds, the common snipe, the yellow- bellied bittern.

A rail, buff-banded rail, weaves among the legs of picnickers who loll at ease on the buttress roots of fig trees. It queries fallen fruit with manners so refined as to be indeterminate, its herringbone immaculate. Aloof though underfoot, the rail extracts a crust of pie from picnic residue — no seediness, no trace of table-scrap solicitude for any human hand or face.

You were given feet but had never touched them to earth. You were given the sea and you fed upon it for months. So when your head crowned, ashen with loss of blood from the cord wound tight around your neck, and when they cut you from me, and you were silent, and the tide in me receded, I remembered the shearwaters following the ship—the slow sweep of them riding the wind’s current. The stretch of them, hovering, cruciform, shearing the air the way an envelope slides back into a box of letters, making its narrow space. I had watched from the stern for hours their trailing: as if stillness itself drifted toward me. I thought it was my life. Then someone lifted you up, and there was a sound, and they laid you on me, breathing.