89 Birds poems

As for her, the circumstances must be ordinary And so the return. Door unlocked. The path mowed Right to the oiled gate; the pasture Cleared of stone and alder. All untouched Enough to enter. The man or woman Off down the valley or working above Treeline. No other sound but a few strays Hurrying through the dusk as if the end Will begin, certain and with nothing More to say. She does not know she does not know. Having come back to find her kind And none being left she took herself up Into a tree unclear what to do next save only Sing the song she wanted sung back to her.

Birds small enough to nest in our young cypress Are physicians to us They burst from the tree exactly Where the mind ends and the eye sees Another world the equal of this one Though only a small boy naked in the sun Glad day glad day I was born Sparrow hatted old New York And the physician who brought me Drowned under sail next day in a calm sea There are birds small enough to live forever Where the mind ends and where My love and I once planted a cypress Which is God to us

are heading south, pulled by a compass in the genes. They are not fooled by this odd November summer, though we stand in our doorways wearing cotton dresses. We are watching them as they swoop and gather— the shadow of wings falls over the heart. When they rustle among the empty branches, the trees must think their lost leaves have come back. The birds are heading south, instinct is the oldest story. They fly over their doubles, the mute weathervanes, teaching all of us with their tailfeathers the true north.

Bustle and caw. Recall the green heat rising from the new minted earth, granite and basalt, proto-continents shuffling and stacking the deck, first shadows flung from the ultraviolet haze. A fern uncurls from the swamp, the microscopic furnace of replication warms the world, one becoming two, two four: exponential blossom. Lush with collision, the teacup balance of x and y, cells like balloons escaping into the sky—then the dumbstruck hour, unmoored by a river, a first fish creeps to the land to marvel at the monstrous buds of its toes. And stars grow feet and walk across the years, into these dozing, ordinary days, climbing the spine’s winding stair, where crickets yawn and history spins.

Birdsong, face it, some male machine gone addled—repeat, repeat—the damage keeps doing, the world ending then starting, the first word the last, etc. It's that etcetera. How to love. Is a wire just loose? Build an ear for that. Fewer, they say. So many fewer, by far. He's showing off to call her back. Or claiming the tree. Or a complaint—the food around here, the ants, the moths, the berries. She's making the nest, or both are. In feathers, in hair or twigs, in rootlets and tin foil. Shiny bits seen from a distance, a mistake. But fate has reasons to dress up. Stupid and dazzling have a place, a place, a place though never. She can't sing it.

For Craig The blackbird sings at the frontier of his music. The branch where he sat marks the brink of doubt, is the outpost of his realm, edge from which to rout encroachers with trills and melismatic runs sur- passing earthbound skills. It sounds like ardor, it sounds like joy. We are glad here at the border where he signs the air with his invisible staves, “Trespassers beware”— Song as survival— a kind of pure music which we cannot rival.

The Audubon warblers keep the time of their coming, Arriving on stillness of a storm, Their breast and backs as dark as low bruised banks of cloud, Rumps and throats as yellow as blooms of buckwheat. They throng this evening in the newly-leaved Tender-tipped canopies nervously weaving Through the catkins like frantic prophets Bearing some divine prophecy of the coming spring. I wait, hoping for nothing too grave: News of ruinous lands, of cutting and swarming locusts, Of withering vines and empty granaries, Of fasting, weeping, and rending of garments. No, I wait for lighter fare: Perhaps a promise that the green heron will nest On the west end of the slough and that the ironweed And wood lily will once again together bloom. This would be an ample prophecy for another year— This and a promise to keep the time of their coming.

These water birds flew out from the minds Of fishermen and became fishing peons Wealthy sailors watched as darters emerged again To spread drenched wings in the sun And marked them as emblems for spinnakers Painters and ornithologists studied darters Until they became black-feathered arrows That pierced the souls of their creators These birds rode surf of bitter laughter And wiped out on a zoo’s concrete Key Largo To imitate darters lovers ripped off their clothes And plunged into the swiftness of estuaries Down the water column they entered brackish hell Their hair transformed to iridescent plumage Ruffled by memories of earth’s human atmosphere We can experience the lives of these feathered beings By flexing our particular despairs each morning At evening we take in the news as best we can On late nights we gaze at dead bodies of water And almost perceive those wet wings working the tide

I am a student of wrens. When the mother bird returns to her brood, beak squirming with winged breakfast, a shrill clamor rises like jingling from tiny, high-pitched bells. Who’d have guessed such a small house contained so many voices? The sound they make is the pure sound of life’s hunger. Who hangs our house in the world’s branches, and listens when we sing from our hunger? Because I love best those songs that shake the house of the singer, I am a student of wrens.

the seven songs After joy raises you into the stratosphere, ride earth’s colors as you wheel down. Fear backs you into a cave, only then do you cackle and hiss. Curse at a tornado and it might curse back. Why kick pebbles on your enemy? You will die without burying him. The ascent out of despair must be steady, slow, or your lungs will explode, your blood boil. Which is wisest: to endure hunger or waddle among wolves? Warn those you love when the predator approaches. Screech loudest when you are the predator.