Dear Family Chronicle of a Flock of Pigeons,

There are so few pigeon

heroes, or dastards,

and also, I think,

so few affairs, since

each and every character

mates

for life—the history

of pigeons

is a chronicle

without wars—sure, a falcon

grabs a sacrifice now

and again,

but on the whole this

is the tale of how you rose,

a chorus on

a January morning,

wings nearly

white against a bank

of darker cloud, and I

read that chapter,

thankful to see

the fog of my breath

while I waited

on the train, nearly

able in that moment

to love my lifetime the way

a flock of pigeons loves

to be silver in a flash

of sky, dark

then silver.

Notes from The Book of Light

Exciting news!  The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton is coming out this fall. Ever since I discovered her work in the early 1990s, Clifton has been a major deity in my poetry pantheon. Denise Levertov said of Clifton's work:

"Poems after poem exhilarates and inspires awe at the manifestation of such artistic and spiritual power."

Even more than Levertov, Clifton could be so compact and succinct.  I don't know of another American poet who uses five and dime words--the vocabulary of the everyday--to build such palaces of language.

thel

          was my first landscape

          red brown as the clay

          of her georgia.

          sweet attic of a woman,

          repository of old songs.

          there was such music in her;

          she would sit, shy as a wren

          humming alone and lonely

          amid broken promises,

          amid the sweet broken bodies

          of birds.


You can see Lucille Clifton read her work here.

 





 

Selections from a Commuter's Notebook

1. Mornings
when the first
cottonwood

seeds flurry down across
May
lawns and

gather at curbsides and
among the yellow
irises, mornings

like this--Night
forgot
to take in the moon,

it remains
a white stone
in the pool of the sky.


2. Morning
is what the starlings
discuss

as they pick at the chaff
of the newly
mown lawn, while

ambling dogs, grey
of muzzle, sniff
the weed beds

for news: summer,
dare we say it, becomes
general

and insistent
in this patch
of the world. God

cracks the knuckles
of his grass
stained hands.

3. The Lawn
of Rosehill
Cemetery already

gone flat
and golden though
it's not yet July--

In this encampment,
do you hear a murmured
conversation

from the pup tents of the dead?

The Parakeet

It was in a large bush in a park next to Navy Pier downtown. Darren pointed it out and I moved closer to it.  The whole flock of sparrows that had been in the bush also, all hopsome and chirping, flew away, leaving the parakeet behind. I moved closer, and though it hopped another few inches deeper into the bush, it did not fly away.  I spoke to it, the way I'd heard bird owners speak to their pets, and it tilted its head, listening.  I held out my hand, finger outstretched, imagining that it would come to me and I would save it.  But the parakeet did not jump onto my outstretched finger. It called, a call that seemed so familiar.  I realized it was the sound a sparrow makes, the parakeet had learned a new language. I hoped it would survive the winter. I hoped the sparrows continued to keep company with the yellow and lime green little guy. I thought about fitting in. I thought about adoption.  I thought about captivity, and escape, and the prices of freedom. I thought about how beautiful the small bird was, and also too the hundred sparrows around it, and I got on my bike and rode away.

And a Third Re-Working

I never ride the train back from Michigan without thinking of you and how you died—the lonely parking lot, your mouth, the gun, it’s something about repeating the journey, about the long trip back, after I had to identify your body in the morgue, a journey with hours for sorrow and regret: the golden light of dried grasses in the empty lots of Detroit, a kind of resurrection, the return of a city to wildlands, to meadow. At the top of a bare tree, a Cooper's hawk stares at military attention--a meal might yet be revealed. A bit later a dozen, two dozen deer bound across a field of last year's mown corn, flashing the arrows of their white tails, maidens fearful of the monstrosity on the tracks, but swans seen from the window of this train, the swans don't care, In inlets, in silvery pools at dusk, they are illegitimate sons of the nearly-full moon, come down to this world to sip from our waters, not the waters of forgetfulness, no these cold waters are opposite of that, and I remember a movie I saw in high school, maybe it was a movie I saw with you—the girl in the movie weeps as she says, I want to dance Juliet, I wanted to dance the role of the swan.

Dear Night,

Thank you for the crows, the day
has borrowed them
for a very long time, and I

want you to know (as the crows certainly
know) that their calls to each other
from the ledges

of buildings and the wet branches
of sidestreet maples, the way they
rejoice at the opened envelope

of a deer by the side of the road,
their flight, whether silent
or harpied, all flurry and rasp,

all of these things should be
happening
at night, dear night, your

time, your place, and so dear night
I have arrived to broker
a deal: we will give you back

the crows.  We will include the sawbox
containing their voices, and slide everything
into the drawer of underbrush rustle,

a coyote's bark, an argument
in the beastly dark.  All we need
in exchange are your bonfires,

those midnight bursts of morning, and later
we can discuss the true
home range of the moon--despite

your best efforts it has been seen
in the firmament one late
July morning.

A Ferocity Even From the Remove of the Kitchen Window.

Yesterday my dad woke me up, calling to me to say there was a hawk in the backyard. The hawk had a pigeon in its talons.  A few feet away from the bird feeder, on top of fresh snow, the hawk plucked the feathers from the pigeon, and the hawk's curved beak probed and pulled strips of flesh from the carcass of the pigeon.  It was beautiful and hypnotic to watch: a ferocity we could sense even from the remove of the kitchen window. The hawk looked like she was dressed for a military action, black bands on her slate grey tail, reddish bars, the color of a female robin's breast, across her chest and belly, and the startling white fluff of her rump. The pull, the tug, the task of plucking a meal. She (later an expert looked at the photos we took and said that a Cooper's Hawk who was large enough to catch a pigeon was surely a female) she was such a harsh and lovely representative of nature "red in tooth and claw." I wonder if I'd feel so kindly toward her if she'd caught a cardinal, or a woodpecker, some bird I see as a "real" bird and not some urban trash.  Pigeons, after all, have their own flocking beauty, silver and startling against a grey winter sky. This makes twice in the past couple of months that I've seen a Cooper's Hawk, that baroness, crouched over her kill near a birdfeeder.  The first time was in Chicago--Darren and I leaving for breakfast disturbed a hawk at her own meal in the courtyard. She grabbed it and fled. Circle of soft down whirling a bit in the wind over larger feathers, speckled red droplets in the snow.  This hawk had killed a pigeon in suburban Michigan. The backyard feeders were silent and deserted the rest of the day, not even the plump squirrels nuzzled the ground below for the peanuts Dad puts out for them--somehow word got out that this was a crime scene. "Somehow" being the feathered circle, the red dots, mournful in the snow. But I had not thought the little brains of feeder birds capable of making these deductions and associations. Does every bird have a bird who would make of it a meal?