Birds At Evening

Among the ways in which I've been inordinately fortunate is to have lived for large parts of my life in at least two places with superb populations of birds: the Sierra Nevada and the Pacific Northwest. I spent a fair amount of time in California's Central Valley, too, and that's a pretty darned good place for birds as well. Sweden is interesting bird-territory, too. I don't remember much about German birds. A friend of mine is living in Indiana temporarily, and the envy I feel for his being able to observe cardinals may be approaching the level of sin, according to John James Audobon, if not the Catholic Church.

Before we moved into the present abode, we had a place in the quasi-country, with lots of trees, shrubs, and flowers, nearby lakes, and a our own small pond. It was an okay neighborhood for humans, but for birds, it was truly upscale. They wanted for nothing, especially when I spent wads of cash on suet and seeds for them, maintained bird-houses, maintained not just the pond but a bird-bath, chased away stray cats, hung moth-balls to ward off raccoons from nests (it works), and let some shrubs grow into dense trees, which to birds are exclusive condominiums. For example, we had a holly "bush" that had grown into a 17-foot tree: Trump Towers. I almost hired a crow or a seagull to serve as the doorman.

The great choral cacophony of birds, especially at evening, from Spring through Fall is one thing I miss about that place. The sheer amount and variety of activity, sound, and bird busy-ness created such exuberance, such a comic display of life, that you couldn't help but smile, even as you toiled in an unmanageable garden or tried to unwind after a stressfully tedious or tediously stressful day. As a subject, birds are almost irresistible to poets--and therefore dangerous. One is likely to get trite or sentimental, or to go over old poetic ground. Also, after what Dickinson, Hopkins, and (William) Everson (among others) did with their bird-poems, the poetic bird-stask is daunting, to say almost the least. With trepidation, then, I post the following poem, which I exhumed, like a lost potato, from the loam of my hard-drive. I post it not just with a poet's trepidation, but also with an amateur's appreciation for some good bird-times.

Birds At Evening

Evenings, birds convene
in trees and shrubs, in sky
and fields, fill air
with sound, thesis of which is
we’re alive; repeat: we’re alive.

Bodily harmonies rise,
spill out of beaked mouths (alive).
Birds can wait,
know, react. They cannot
hope but do embody hope

by going on, by feeding
and feathering, by trickling
water down their throats, by
flitting, flying, hopping,
looking. --By shrugging

feathers into place. No look
is more alive than a bird’s glance:
old news--but still. . . . Night absorbs
last avian riffs, alive . . .live . . .
ive . .e . . Beaks close, and eyelids

shut from the bottom up.

No so much to comment on my own poem (a terrible faux pas), as to add a reinforcing coda: The way birds fluff their feathers out of and into shape has always cracked me up; it sometimes reminds me of Italian-American men "shooting the cuffs" of their tailored shirts. And, unfortunately, I do fancy the idea of birds' "songs" having a thesis. I like birds, and I'm an English teacher, so that nerdly fancy is explicable if not forgivable.