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Posts Tagged ‘nature poetry’

Sunlight Coalesced into Warbler

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , , on May 22, 2011| Leave a Comment »

How often would I have gathered you as a hen gathers her chicks beneath her wing . . . The Gospel of St. Luke

Bogue Banks.  Thirty-four miles long from Fort Macon in the west to the old ferry station at the eastern end, and in most places so narrow you can see both the sound and the ocean from your deck.  And you’re never very many feet from tarmac.

But there is at least one spot on the Banks where you can’t hear the SUV’s grinding along Rte. 58.  Where the live oaks and loblollies are so thick with greenbrier you wouldn’t even think of taking a shortcut.  Where egrets roost in the trees, osprey snag mullet from the inlet, and if you’re real still you can hear the tick and crinkle of a million fiddler crabs tapping their tiny claws to attract a million little females.

The Teddy Roosevelt Natural Area is site of one of North Carolina’s four aquaria, but the real attraction for me and mom are the trails that wind away from the visitors center back into the pine knolls.  Away from sun worship to slow black water and tidal ponds.  And while I’m slapping mosquitoes, Mom is seeing the merest flash of color from a high branch and exclaiming, ” A Redstart!”

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In the steam of the maritime forest and the glare of the strand, parent birds struggle to protect their young from heat.  In this third section of Leave and Come Home, I wonder if I have protected my son adequately from his struggles or too much.  Does a parent ever finish with worrying whether their child will make it?  Will I ever finish questioning whether I’ve been adequate to the task?

.     .     .     .     .

Leave and Come Home
Theodore Roosevelt Natural Area, Pine Knoll Shores, North Carolina

It’s been a long time since anything
surprised me.  By their mere voices I name each bird
that speaks from the rippled heat of jack pine
and yaupon, but I couldn’t tell you a single word
my son would wish to say.  No, that’s wrong.  The problem is
I don’t speak a single word I wish
he’d hear.  Here the birds cover their eggs
not to keep them warm but cool.  They hatch
altricial, blind, but in two weeks they fledge
and fly.  All as it should be.  I feel I have to lay my arm
on Josh’s shoulder not to push him forward
but to hold him up.

This trail crosses black water and climbs a sand knoll
knee deep in mosquitos; I smack
and squirm, but Mom always looks up.  She points
to sunlight coalesced into the shape
of Warbler, Prothonotary, perched at his cleric’s chamber
of commandeered woodpecker hole.
And in your ecclesiastical garments can you accept
confession, the hardest one a father
could admit?  That from reticence, confusion,
or hopes never uncovered like a wing not lifted
from the nestling’s eyes, I haven’t held him up
but held him back.

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[Leave and Come Home won the 2009 Poet Laureate Award of the NC Poetry Society.  In four sections, it reflects some fifty years of being a son and father to a son. Each section covers a different geography, the sighting of a different warbler, and a new phase in our relationship as a family.  I posted section 1 on 5/8, section 2 on 5/15, and I will post section 4 on 5/29.]

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The Fire Out of Reach

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , , on May 15, 2011| 1 Comment »

[for the first post in this series of four, see May 8]

Years ago, before I’d reached my fortieth birthday, I remember talking to a friend who was looking pretty darn glum about his fiftieth. “Oh come on,” I said, “Just think of it as the half-way point.” I couldn’t understand why that didn’t cheer him up. Now my own fiftieth has got dust and flyspecks on the binding, and apparently I still haven’t memorized its aphorisms. If it’s impossible, as must seem obvious to any rational being, to put right all the mistakes I’ve made, why do I keep looking back? Why do all the possible futures unfolding out of my particular Heisenbergian uncertainty seem to have edges of creeping tarnish?

In this second section of my poem Leave and Come Home, I am struggling with uncertainty. Will our future relationship, mine and my son’s, be bright as the Firethroat or remain out of reach? I think of my own Dad, turning 85 this year. So much of our communication in my younger years was subterranean, never quite reaching the surface. How much angst did I cause him with my long hair and Grateful Dead? (Some other day I’ll share about how Linda helped us re-learn how to hug.) So much I didn’t know about my father, and so long before it occurred to me that I didn’t.

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Several year’s ago Aunt Ellen (Dad’s sister) was going through boxes of papers from their parents’ home and discovered a letter Dad had written to his Mom from Boy Scout camp. He must have been thirteen. He had just passed the requirements to earn Birdwatching Merit Badge and was describing the birds he’d identified. Wait a minute! Big Momso is the bird watcher! You sneaky Dad, you, looking up into those branches all that time and never telling me what you were seeing. Well, I’m telling.

.  .  .  .  .

Leave and Come Home

Horseshoe Island, Newfound Lake, Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, Minnesota

Last night a pair of Bald Eagles scrawled their wild script
along the silver lake. We lay on high rocks above the water, waited
for the final stars of our adventure to ignite.
Only Hermit Thrush spoke – silence
unaccustomed from our Scouts but habitual
for Josh and me.

This morning I leave him to goad
the younger ones to break our last camp –
when he leaves for college will he goad himself?
I follow the island trails, aim field glasses high
as if the warblers I’ve learned this trip might bestow
some special unction. When I pause they gather
in low branches and cock their heads, a query
I can’t answer. They leave me there.

Almost finished now, this last solitude, this last trail that has tried
to lead back to my son, close enough to hear
the tink of scrubbed pots; high in the spruce
another unnamed voice reedy and ascending
into emptiness. I search, it flees; I scan, it eludes until
on a gray limb in the gray-green canopy with a gray moth
in its needle beak it blazes: Firethroat. Blackburnian Warbler.
And if I rush to camp and pull Josh back in time
will we look up and share the prize
or stare into empty branches?

.  .  .  .  .

[Leave and Come Home won the 2009 Poet Laureate Award of the NC Poetry Society. In four sections, it covers fifty some years of being a son and father to a son. Each section covers a different geography, the sighting of a different warbler, and a new phase in our relationship as a family. I posted section 1 on 5/8; I will post section 3 on 5/22 and section 4 on 5/29.]

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Big Momso

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , on May 8, 2011| 1 Comment »

I can’t recall exactly when Mary Ellen bestowed this nickname on our mother, but into her ninth decade she is still Big Momso. And rightly so. Not for her mass or the amount of space she displaces – she’s a sprite who has to hang on tight in a high wind – but because of her big presence in our lives. Do we love words? She’s addicted to the NY Times crossword. Do we like to see who can make the other laugh first? I remember the last time she took me trick-or-treating down the street (I was 45 at the time), wearing an old wig pulled all the way down over her face and eyes painted on her cheek, totally freaking out the neighbors. Are we the least bit creative? Since her art degree from Women’s College (now UNC-Greensboro), she has never laid down the charcoals and oils, still trying out new techniques.

So here’s a few things I might not have thanked you for lately, Momso. Like going back to Kent State for your teacher’s certificate so you could help put me through school. Always being willing to pull out the old cast iron skillet and make your world famous inimitable never-to-be duplicated fried chicken, even if you and Dad are more into tofu and spring greens these days (OK, thanks for the beef wellington, too). And this is a really big one, thanks for always teaching us. From the time we quit putting everything on the ground into our mouths, you’ve inspired us to appreciate the strange creatures on the beach; the flowers of forest and garden; the scenes of Homer and the Wyeths; the joy of open books.

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All of which leads me to the biggest one: Thanks for the birds. I don’t remember when you first taught me to call that red bird in the backyard a Cardinal, but I do remember heading off for my sophomore year with a big bag of seed and a windowsill feeder. For years afterwards I was satisfied to know the difference between a titmouse and a chickadee, until that one afternoon in the Shenandoahs over twenty years ago. You and Dad had rented a cabin, our kids were still pre-teen and not averse to a walk in the woods. We’d come to a big blowdown where sun streamed into the forest, and you pointed to a flit of saffron. I lifted my binoculars. And then I wrote down its name. And I’ve been keeping a list ever since.

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My poem Leave and Come Home won the 2009 Poet Laureate Award of the NC Poetry Society. In four sections, it covers fifty some years of being a son and father to a son. Each section covers a different geography, the sighting of a different warbler, and a new phase in our relationship as a family. This is the first section:

Leave and Come Home

Lewis Mountain, Shenandoah National Park, Virginia

Mom may have said Redbird once in her life
but what she taught us kids was Cardinal,
Chickadee, Titmouse, the feeder gang – learn a creature’s name
and the two of you share a home in creation.
Her wedding gift to us was field guides, binoculars;
we hung our own feeders, shooed away the squirrels,
and they arrived, the usual characters, the recognized.
When our son could reach the sill and look he didn’t say Redbird,
and when we visited Grandmommy she would point into the trees.

This summer a gathering of generations at a mountain cabin,
the cool of altitude, red spruce and chestnut oak speaking
a language I don’t yet comprehend, nor realize I don’t.
Where a giant has fallen new growth points to sky,
and Mom points – a new word for me, an unnamed color.
Chestnut-Sided Warbler opens its throat and explains all,
a preface, a turning page. Josh, age ten now, reaches
for the glasses – Dad, let me look! Yes look, my God yes,
keep looking. But even more keep wanting to.

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Today’s List
Reynolda Gardens, May 8, 2011

Northern Cardinal
Eastern Bluebird
American Robin
Common Grackle
House Finch
Northern Mockingbird
Gray Catbird
American Goldfinch
European Starling
Eastern Towhee
Carolina Wren
Great Crested Flycatcher
Green Heron
Wood Thrush
Brown Thrasher
Yellow-throated Vireo
Red-Eyed Vireo
Black-Throated Green Warbler
Common Yellowthroat
Hairy Woodpecker
Red-Bellied Woodpecker
Red-Shouldered Hawk

 

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