V E R S E and I M A G E

The feathered wife asked her feathered husband –

She watches as he cleans his wings, notes how he sends his eyes

+++ over the horizon

To viridian in the flying away direction.

So many migrations stacked within sky memory.

Her body is stirring with eggs. She tucks found materials

Into their nest with her beak.

The nerves in her wingtips sense rains coming to soften the ground.

To send food to the surface of the earth.

He says nothing –

As he wonders about the careless debris that humans make

Even as it yields ribbon, floss and string.

Housecats and their sporting trails are on his mind’s map.

There are too many in this neighborhood.

A ragged yellow fellow eats birds after hours of play.

He stays out of that tom’s way, and has warned his wife

The same. Though she’s more wisely wary than him.

Dogs are easy. They bark and leap and wag their tails.

They have no concerns for most flying things.

They lap up human trails for love.

And why do we keep renewing this ceremony of nests?

Each feathered generation flies away.

What does it mean, and why

the green growing green

turning red against yellow,

then gray, gray and green again?

When I need her heartbeat

In the freeze winds why is she always there

And not somewhere else?

Her lilt question has made an echo in his ears

like a string fluttering from a bush

In the delicate spring wind:

I wonder what you are thinking . . .

He doesn’t answer.

Then he does.

“Nothing.

I was thinking about the nothing of nothing at all.”

from An American Sunrise, W. W. Norton, New York NY, © 2019

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I wonder what this House Wren outside my kitchen door is thinking. I think I can tell what he is thinking by watching what he is doing and listening to what he is saying, but is what I’m thinking he’s thinking really what he’s thinking?

Two weeks ago he – and I do mean “he,” no question about male behavior – discovered the new wren house my daughter and her Josh gave us for Christmas. For days he perched on it and blasted us with what he calls song: three razor sharp notes followed by high decibel jumble sounding like everyone’s tripping all over each other. He would sing for a few minutes, then I’d hear him on the other side of the neighbor’s yard, then down in the woods, then back to us. Pretty soon I caught him shoving sticks into the wren-sized hole in the little hanging house, then hopping inside before jutting his head out and singing again.

House Wren males build two or more “dummy nests” to attract a mate. If the female likes what she sees, she picks him for her chicks’ daddy and picks one site; she finishes off the nest with soft before laying eggs. My personal wren spent at least a week making the circuit of his three nests. Were there no females in this end of Surry County? Did I detect his singing becoming ever more energetic? (“Frantic” and “insistent” would also be good descriptors for that revving engine of a song.) Finally I noticed two wrens hopping branch to branch in the serviceberry tree where the nesting box hangs. Yes! And they’ve stayed, so they must be a pair. (To mere humans male and female House Wrens look absolutely identical, no trace of sexual dimorphism).

And he still sings. A few times an hour instead of every few minutes. I’m thinking those first songs conveyed him thinking, “This is my big chance. c’mon C’mon C’MON!” Now he’s thinking, “OK, off to a good start, kids to raise, you other wrens listen and weep and KEEP YOUR DISTANCE!” But how do I know? Just because that power-song jumps my heartbeat 20 points doesn’t mean it’s not, for the wren himself, the most laid back Zen-song in the Avian Class. In fact, it’s probably fruitless and a little silly for me to even think I can know what he’s thinking.

But then there is this: I am grateful for the tiny eggs and I’m positive he and she are as well. Let me sing for you, little House Wren, my song of gratitude.

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Joy Harjo’s An American Sunrise is a journey, a revelation, a lament, a celebration. I featured three poems last week in THE WAY HOME and pondered what it might take for us to all become family. This week, though, I can’t leave her book without sharing these two poems about birds. They knock me out. I often suspected but now I see it’s true that I share a lot of DNA with birds (well, Family Hominidae and Class Aves are all part of Phylum Vertebrata, so YES we all share plenty of genes). If you, too, want to be a bird when you grow up, send me a comment after you finish reading.

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An American Sunrise, Joy Harjo; W. W. Norton & Company, New York NY © 2019. Joy Harjo served as Poet Laureate of the United States for three terms, 2019 through 2021.

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We watched her grow up.

She was the urgent chirper,

Fledgling flier.

And when spring rolled

Out its green

She’d grown

Into the most noticeable

Bird-girl.

Long-legged and just

The right amount of blush

Tipping her wings, crest

And tail, and

She knew it

In the bird parade.

We watched her strut.

She owned her stuff.

The males perked their armor, greased their wings,

And flew sky-loop missions

To show off

For her.

In the end

There was only one.

There’s that one you circle back to – for home.

This morning

The young couple scavenge seeds

On the patio.

She is thickening with eggs.

Their minds are busy with sticks the perfect size, tufts of fluff

Like dandelion, and other pieces of soft.

He steps aside for her, so she can eat.

Then we watch him fill his beak

Walk tenderly to her and kiss her with seed.

The sacred world lifts up its head

To notice –

We are double, triple blessed.

from An American Sunrise, W. W. Norton, New York NY, © 2019

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