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Week 2: Thirty Birds
Thirty Birds, my first published tributary, offers poetry devoted to thirty different aviary species. The book has names and photographs, but I’ve decided to keep it to the poetry this time.
01/08: And I Shall Broadcast, Saying Nothing, The Starry Echoes Of The Wave...
01/09: Looking Forward
01/10: What Rubin Saw
01/11: Rubin's Robin
01/12: Ben, by the way (A Guest Poem For The Menagerie)
01/13: Thirty Birds : A Foreword
01/14: Moleskin 1.2: A Proper Introduction
01/08:
And I Shall Broadcast, Saying Nothing, The Starry Echoes Of The Wave...
Y yo transmitiré sin decir nada
los ecos estrellados de la ola...
- Pablo Neruda, from Deber del Poeta
Social creatures of the neighborhood gather,
one by one, to sit and watch the waves roll in.
There will be another time to jump into the water,
to splash, to play,
to catch fish and work the waves.
There will be a time, too, for leaving this place,
riding the winds and
finding inland treasures.
But for now, and here, they are content
to gather, to pause,
to gaze and ponder.
They take their place on the sand,
a few yards away from the water’s edge,
a few feet one from another,
And quietly converse without words:
There will be a time, soon enough,
to engage in raucous
playground laughter,
And there will be a time as well
to broadcast complaints
and call neighborhoods together,
But for now, and here, they are satisfied
to stop, to compose,
to start to consider.
They take their place under the sun,
pulling up one leg
in restful balance,
This is their moment of peace;
this is their poem to remember.
And there will be a time for recitations,
as there will be places without peace,
But it is enough,
here and now,
to sit and watch the waves roll in.
01/09:
Looking Forward
To my daughter, on her birthday
Forward is the chance to see my
daughter and my son grow older.
Forward is the order of the seasons:
winter, spring and summer.
Forward wakes before the dawn, and
forward makes its way back home.
Forward sees the setting sun
and looks beyond.
----
Dawn gently breaks,
not as a sudden thing:
the sun
of a day’s ontogeny
does not surprise,
nor does it sound
a loud awakening
or slap
the first breath out of me
or shine
hard light accusingly
into my naked eyes.
Dawn is the dark’s
slow unraveling,
the day’s revealing rise.
Time dawns on me:
I am inclined
to set alarms at night
and run
cold showers when I wake.
I want to face the day
before it faces me.
I need light
to put
my clothes on properly,
but usually long
before the break
of dawn I’m on my way,
letting dawn
distinguish those who work
from those with time
to play.
I am determined to beat the day,
though dawn,
and in dawn’s easy pace,
is when
and how I ought to rise,
letting nature have its say
instead of doing
it my own way, chasing
shadows
to the next horizon,
courting ghosts
of healthy, wealthy, wise
to my dying day;
despite the dawn,
I keep on facing
life the other way.
But dawn keeps on
and on
that day of final rest,
if I
should wake before I die
I pray the rising sun
will shake
me from my sleepiness
and let
me see the morning sky
wash over me
once more before
my daily dawns are done,
before
my final east to west
and the pull of a setting sun.
----
Forward is the chance to see my
daughter and my son grow older.
Forward is the order of the seasons:
winter, spring and summer.
Forward wakes before the dawn, and
forward makes its way back home.
Forward sees the setting sun
and looks beyond.
01/10:
What Rubin Saw
In an older generation
of still life souls, one
paused mid-conversation
on a summertime patio
and saw (or almost didn’t,
if not for the breeze
and an offhand chance
for the mind to wander)
more than ever before,
more than anyone else
took time to consider
the peripheral scene,
a remarkable moment
of cause to give notice
to that which in the
greencut grass was
never even there as far as
conversations go (so
far as he had ever known),
and in that pause,
for all that it was,
found poetry, perhaps,
or a minute, at least,
of something more
than prose...
01/11:
Rubin's Robin
What would you write, Rubin, of this odd bird
That sticks out its fat chest and bounces through grass
Dancing with butterflies, pulling at worms,
Covering ground with a chirp and a hop?
What gives you pause, Rubin, and what have you heard
That we didn’t notice and started to pass,
Ever commuting through everyday terms,
Running through seasons with no time to stop?
What did you see, Rubin, that we didn’t see
Or set to the side long ago and moved on
To whatever matters have caused us to be
Blind to the beauty of birds on the lawn?
How does it feel, Rubin, discovering spring
in the middle of August and finding a song
in your own back yard and suddenly starting
to look at those things that were there all along?
How sad, to think we laughed,
To think we laughed and thought,
We laughed, thought you absurd
To stand and cheer an ordinary bird.
01/12:
Ben, by the way
(A Guest Poem For The Menagerie)
Ben, by the way, when
one of our parakeets
died last week, was the first to say
when freer days were
over, and the summer,
alas, had ended coolly,
when I didn’t have
time for such a poem
as this on the Lost Menagerie,
as we lowered
the birdcage from our Russian
rafters, Ben was the one to pray.
He prayed, especially
when I dug the lifeless
bird into the autumn earth,
not quite a
see-you-later prayer, more
than an hasta-manana blessing,
days before the
pet store’s replica would
join its brothers in the chapel cage
Ben prayed with
a grateful appreciation,
saying “thank you for your worth.”
And now the other
parakeet, placed beside
those who would live another day
and lifted with them
to hang from the rafters rising
over one who had died
is placid, quiet
as a gravedigger, or
confused, with no words to offer,
and it was for this
parakeet, too, by the way,
that Ben was the first to pray.
01/13:
Thirty Birds : Foreword
I do not know which to prefer, the birds of photography or the birds of poetry, flight in a frame or songs on a page.
Of course, I would really prefer a walk in the woods, across the prairie or along the shore to see the herons, thrushes, sparrows and gulls in their proper places. I would give you the birds themselves if I could, and if I could be sure they wouldn't fly away.
But I will give you what I can: my own thumbnail pictures and sets of sonnets, mixed in with fair use snippets of classic poetry by Yeats, Neruda, Oliver, Baudelaire and more than thirty other familiar poets. Like the birds, I would give you the whole of these other poets if I could, that you might walk into their woods and along their shores.
It will be enough, though, if I can inspire you to see and listen for yourselves.
01/14:
Moleskin 1.2: A Proper Introduction
The big chapters are daunting: love, faith, health, pride, humility, so let me start with tamer subjects: diversions, distractions, digressions. You can skip this section if you want, but this is what defines me: old fashioned poetry, watching birds in their natural state, listening to human music; joys of discovery, paddling down a slow river, taking time for an arthouse movie; aerobic meditation, finding rhythm in routine, sometimes changing the pace. Noticing the rule of threes. The big chapters, love and God and healing, the ups and the downs, will be more important I suppose, or as important as a story for posterity should be. But this is me, and this is my proper introduction. Chapter Two, then: I am alive. Maybe, whimsically, this will be the whole story.
