89 Birds poems

It was winter, near freezing, I'd walked through a forest of firs when I saw issue out of the waterfall a solitary bird. It lit on a damp rock, and, as water swept stupidly on, wrung from its own throat supple, undammable song. It isn't mine to give. I can't coax this bird to my hand that knows the depth of the river yet sings of it on land.

You’ve got to understand that sighting the pair of eagles over the block, right over our house, not more than twenty feet above the roof, so massive their wings pull at the corrugated tin sheeting even with gentlest tilt, counteracts bitterness against all the damage I see and hear around me on an exclusively crisp blue morning, when clarity is pain and even one small missing wattle tree, entirely vanquished since I was last here at home—I still find this hard to say—is agony; a region is not a pinpoint and a different compass works in my head, having magnetics for all directions and all pointing to one spot I know and observe as closely as possible; and even one small vanished or vanquished wattle tree is agony close to death for me, where I find it hard to breathe to feed myself to get past the loss; but the pair of eagles still appearing and keeping their sharp and scrupulous eyes honed, overrides this ordeal, though I wish their victims life too and their damage is traumatic as anything else; that’s as much sense or nonsense as I can make in such blue light.

He clasps the crag with crooked hands; Close to the sun in lonely lands, Ring'd with the azure world, he stands. The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls; He watches from his mountain walls, And like a thunderbolt he falls.

Hammering a dent out of a bucket a woodpecker answers from the woods

Sparrows tapping your shutters louvres? snow owls guano your eaves? Spring rainstorms sway in your gutters; down-cellar a green pipe pearls and roots find its fissures. Matter—outside us, out in le Vrai, matter—un-does;fatiscit; a sort of eternal breakdown and sloughage. Small wonder that Saturday finds you botanizing some mast-high aisle in the Depot. Fazed by stock-names and numbers, distinctions like drip-forged and molly- and carborundum-steel, or, in DIMENSIONAL LUMBER, the trunk chart. Its dotted lines follow core cuts, mere spindles, out to the perimeter or “wane,” a ring of two-by-twelves with moonrim bark ribbons. Yet even sparrows must nest-mend with worldstuff torn out of somewhere. The joinery-bits in the MASTER JOINER blister-pack point to his fast parataxes—copulas, common- alities, ship-lists, figures in carpets or slimmer hex-keys in sets, the eternal angle (Egyptian) or iron plane-handles tuned to the unheard rumor that joins them. The same slits reparied once with tendon- thread in bone needles, bronze pins, the earliest factory-fittings or the long floating line of the bass-baritone Leporello, his catàlogo of continents and couplings ironizing, admiring, down to the final mel- isma on DOES (you know the Don’s doings) voi . . . sapete, voi . . . sapete . . . quel che FA-AHH, ah-ahh, ah-ahh

The windows are dressed in feathers where the birds have flown against them, then fallen below into the flowers where their bodies lie grounded, still, slowly disappearing each day until all that is left are their narrow, prehensile bones. I have sat at my window now for years and watched a hundred birds mistake the glass for air and break their necks, wondering what to do, how else to live among them and keep my view. Not to mention the sight of them at the feeder in the morning, especially the cardinal in snow. What sign to post on the sill that says, "Warning, large glass window. Fatal if struck. Fly around or above but not away. There are seeds in the feeder and water in the bath. I need you, which is to say, I'm sorry for my genius as the creature inside who attracts you with seeds and watches you die against the window I've built with the knowledge of its danger to you. With a heart that rejects its reasons in favor of keeping what it wants: the sight of you, the sight of you."

Who are these masked birds? Not Robin Hoods, for they live in the open woods. They only deal in stolen goods like berry futures, cedar cones, and sweet, sweet, fruit (but leave the stones). Insects they catch on the fly when swarms of them go buzzing by. No need to worry, moan. or fret. Your valuables they will not get.

Is it some turn of wind that funnels them all down at once, or is it their own voices netting to bring them in—the roll and churr of hundreds searing through river light and cliff dust, each to its precise mud nest on the face none of our own isolate groping, wishing need could be sent so unerringly to solace. But this silk-skein flashing is like heaven brought down: not to meet ground or water—to enter the riven earth and disappear.

They pay me to lift the ball off the bat touch the slender hand and slip beneath the taut band I plant bulbs and mulch the mound I hone a group of black birds I do the simplest thing In unison with the trees people move as the sun moves He calls a seagull an eagle and I agree Across the pond they say I will I know this is a problem for the painter, etc. Tell me where to go if they ditch me mid-season tell me a word seeks its world Praise be to the upper lip of decision praise be to dumb clanking stems Everything is alive even you, floral loafer

Not to be confused with messenger pigeons, birds sent behind enemy lines in war, but think passengers as in birds carrying suitcases, sharing a berth on a train, or traveling in bamboo cages on a ship, always migrating on a one-way to extinction. How would extinction look on a graph? A steady climb, or a plateau, then a precipitous cliff at the dawn of humans? Nesting grounds eight hundred square miles in area. Skies swollen with darkening multitudes. Days and days of unbroken flocks passing over.Ectopistes migratorius. And the last of the species, Martha, named for Martha Washington, dies in a cage in 1914 at the Cincinnati Zoo. Forget clemency. We are the worst kind of predator, not even deliberate in our destruction. Our killing happens à la carte, on the side (side of Dodo?). And because the nineteenth century did not enlist a battlefield artist for extinctions, there are no official witnesses to the slaughter, just participants. If you could somehow travel back to this scene, through the would-be canvas, you would run flailing your arms toward the hardwood forests and the men with sticks and guns and boiling sulphur pots to bring birds out of the trees, as if you could deliver 50,000 individual warnings, or throw yourself prostrate on the ground, as if your one body could hold sway.