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Chimney Swifts

Posted in Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, Bradley Strahan, Heron Clan, imagery, nature photography, NC Poets, poetry, Preston Martin, Priscilla Webster-Williams, Southern writing on July 28, 2023| 4 Comments »

[with poems from Heron Clan X]

Chimney Swifts at the Historic Carolina Coach Garage

Two now more arrive and flit into the swirl,

swelling hive mind they shift and shape

the wind, counter then clockwise whirl

above old brickwork’s beckoning gape

left standing here erect as testament,

our conservational intent to leave

some landmark urban respite, benevolent

perhaps, perhaps self-serving; we’ve

taken advantage of their propulsive drive,

pushed our chairs back from the table

in the court to lean & steal their lives

and freedom open mouthed, rapt, able

for these few moments until darkness falls

to rise with them, untethered, bold

venture to where the elemental almost calls

but too soon bedtime, now our supper’s cold.

[For decades this warehouse and shop in Raleigh, North Carolina was a hub of activity servicing Carolina Coach Company buses, in the 1940s the nation’s largest regional bus company.]

Bill Griffin

❦ ❦ ❦

Mom can no longer hear their restless chitterings up the flue on summer evenings. When we sit on the front porch she doesn’t notice their atmospheric ellipsis, punctuating summer afternoons with their aerobatics. She can’t believe they’re calling constantly to each other and to us until I try to mimic that chatter and she laughs. What she most definitely can, though, is wish to see them diving into her chimney at dusk, especially when I tell her I’d seen one do just that last night.

Revered ornithologist Roger Tory Peterson described Chimney Swifts as little dark cigars with wings. Tapered on the head end and the tail end with sharply tapered wings jutting out mid-fuselage, fluttering so rapidly you’d swear those wingbeats were uncoordinated and asynchronous, well, yes they do look like airborne cigars. Although they often appear in field guide pages adjacent to those other famous aerial foragers, the Swallows, taxonomists place Swifts most closely related to Hummingbirds (based on wing structure). No hovering, though, for these Chimney Swifts – always forward, forward, forward with their loops and barrel rolls. Some species of Swift only alight to lay eggs, spending all the rest of their lives in the air.

Once you recognize a Chimney Swift’s fricative titter, you’ll realize they’ve accompanied you on hot afternoons and evenings all your life (assuming you live in the Eastern US). Although they winter in Peru, all summer long from the Great Plains to the Atlantic coast Chimney Swifts are widespread and common, probably more common today than they were pre-colonization, when they depended on hollow trees for breeding. These days they sometimes nest by the hundreds in abandoned chimneys, great clouds spiraling in at dusk, perhaps mistaken for bats. You can even buy chimney-like roosting boxes to attract them to your yard to eat the mosquitos.

After supper, I carry our chairs to the deck for a clean line of sight to the chimney. No smoke has risen from these three pots for decades. Mom and I watch. And watch. The birds circle and tantalize, gyre away, spiral out of earshot then back again so swiftly she misses their brief passage. Keep looking. Don’t blink. Two Swifts buzz the opening but then pull up in a high-G climb. Sky darkens. Dusk wants to coalesce around us, trundle us back indoors. Suddenly one little bird at full throttle blips straight down into the chimney. Then another. It’s become too dark to count the rest, but when we return to the couch beside the fireplace we hear the nestling together of a congenial company who’ll rest here with us until first light.

❦

Doug Stuber, Ed Lyons, and Richard Smyth Ph.D. hatched the idea for Poems from the Heron Clan in Rochester, New York in 1998. After Doug returned in 2015 from a seven-year professorship in South Korea, the anthology has been published every year. Not only does Volume Ten encompass a wide geography – poets from five continents, poets from Turkey, Brazil, Dominican Republic, Montenegro, and a dozen other countries – it also embraces a lavish geography of style and theme. The editors explicitly state: “We aim to represent well-established poets and emerging writers, young and mature poets, and poets of color.”

And North Carolina. NC poets populate these pages abundantly. JS Absher, Glenn Cassidy, Earl Huband, Shelby Stephenson, Steve Cushman, Anna Dallara, the three founders themselves – if you live in the South and read poetry, you’ll recognize these voices accompanying you all summer, all seasons. I’m drawn to all of the Carolina poetry in this volume and tempted to sample each one in this post. Alas, perhaps you’ll just have to purchase a copy. Meanwhile, here are Priscilla Webster-Williams, Preston Martin, and Bradley Strahan from Heron Clan X.

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Morton Salt

Under a purple umbrella, a girl in a yellow raincoat

carries a box of salt, the cover art singing out

When It Rains It Pours. I studied the dark blue carton

that lived on the kitchen table, the Morton Salt Girl

smiling with each shake of the cylinder.

Morton, my father, toured with the big bands,

playing what he called Mickey Mouse Music,

tunes too tame for one who’d grown up crating

spicy Chicago jazz with Red Nichols and Jimmy Dorsey.

Morton met Jean, my mom-to-be, at the Nicollet,

where she was hostess of the grand dining room:

Grant Wood murals, double white linens,

real silver silverware, and a stage

for the musicians and the act.

Morton must have winked at Jean

from behind his golden trombone,

the vocalist crooning I’ll be seeing you

in all the old familiar places.

He must have whispered some kind of proposal

as they floated like movie stars across the dance floor.

When I was six, Mother shredded my Father’s photo,

set her stoic Midwestern jaw, and never spoke

of him again. She didn’t need to, his features etched

on my face like the grooves in one of his Bluebird records,

the same strawberry-blond hair appearing in my mirror.

Each day, I gazed at his name on that dark blue box

stamped with the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval,

and over time, Morton, my founding father,

became a pillar of salt.

Priscilla Webster-Williams

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Elegy, Gloria Died in Eden

She took the well-traveled road

two nights ago.

No more tractoring up the back hills

or brush cutting lower fields,

or using her Daddy’s walking stick

++++ down beside the creek –

or oiling the mower or

penciling in the Reds box score,

or sipping an evening sweet wine

on the porch

++++ as nightly geese call down,

close overhead, descending to the reservoir.

She noted in her diary the day the flew on south.

And who will shoot the coyotes now?

Preston Martin

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Empty Places

In the end we are all archaeologists,

sifting through the ruins of existence

to find shards of pottery

inscribed in a strange tongue:

a letter from a friend left on a picnic table

a poem written on the back of a menu,

the sketch of a girl whose name you can‘t recall,

a yellowed photograph with stranger’s eyes.

We keep on struggling with left over pieces

from a childhood puzzle, trying to fill the gaps

left my smiling lips missing from a face,

tears frozen on eyeless cheeks,

fingers absent from an outstretched hand.

But somehow cannot fill the empty place

and the dark comes creeping in.

Bradley Strahan
from Poems from the Heron Clan Ten, Katherine James Books, Chapel Hill NC. © 2023

originally published in Gargoyle

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The editors of Poems from the Heron Clan invite you to buy a copy, explore their previous issues at their BLOG, and consider submitting three poems and a 50-word bio to:

katherinejamesbooks@gmail.com

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Magic?

Posted in family, music, Photography, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, family, imagery, Michael Hettich, nature, nature photography, poetry, Southern writing on July 14, 2023| 17 Comments »

[with 3 poems by Michael Hettich]

Abide with Me (excerpt)

That first year together, we lived in the shadow

of a fishing line factory, next to a super

highway, under a railroad bridge,

behind a field of junked cars – mountains

of tires, hub caps, and smashed glass – and we

prayed fervently for our love to return

this world to the poised grace we could imagine

when we touched each other just right, or when we saw sunlight

glint on the stream full of chemicals and junk

that ran by the factory walls.

We prayed with our yearning. That year we could float things

in midair on the hymns

we sang in perfect harmony.

We practiced one hymn – “Abide With Me” –

until we could lift cancered minnows from that stream,

until we could lift stray cats and junkyard dogs,

until we could lift each other as high

as our voices carried. We harmonized versions

of our families and secrets, until we could float

each other in unison, knowing if we fell silent

for even on moment, we’d fall . . .

Michael Hettich

from The Halo of Bees

❦ ❦ ❦

When did I lose my knack for magic? Oh, I can still work what from a distance appears to be magic. I can wiggle my nose and make a seven-year old girl laugh. I can pull from my tall black hat the Latin binomial for obscure little flowers that most people don’t even consider flowers. I can perform any number of spells that compel my wee ancient mother to say , “You’re such a good boy.”

I don’t mean I can’t work magic; I mean I’m afraid I’ve lost the knack of magic working me. This morning the home health aide arrived to ride herd on Mom and Dad so I could spend the morning on the beach with grandson Bert and friends. The kid dads had planned some long postponed surf fishing; while Anthony dug for mole crabs, Josh whirled the casting net into the waves and hoped for minnows. On the third throw he brought up two tiny pompano the size of silver dollars and slipped them into a blue plastic bucket of sea water.

Bert, Wyatt, and Mari were more than rapt. The magic of flipping silvery fishes totally captured them and transported them into a new realm. Who would have thought four- and five-year olds could stare into a bucket for a solid hour? The magic of touching those velvet smooth wriggles, the magical bigness of becoming the ones responsible for bringing fresh water from the waves and moving the bucket with the shifting shade, the shocking magic of closeness, even intimacy, with something up until now just so many pictures in books – the magic worked those children. I witnessed their magic and regret to confess that I until I did I had only seen those little fish as bait.

That same evening I drove Mom and Dad over to Bogue Sound – Josh and Bert were going to catch a crab. The tide was right; the dead fish on a string was acceptably fragrant; the blue crab crept closer through the reeds. On his second try, Josh scooped up the dangerous decapod with a dip net and untangled his swimmerets and claws until he plopped into the blue bucket of sound water. A feisty one! Every time Bert moved his hand, the crab snapped claws up out of the water with undaunted ferocity. Bert was magic-smacked. “I never thought I would get this close to a real crab!” This from the boy with a hundred plastic sea creatures of every class, order, and family.

Perhaps I’ve lost the knack to be worked by magic because I read too much about and spend too little time staring into the blue depths of this unrelentingly odd and utterly magical universe. Perhaps the only hope for me is to catch a little magic as it streams off the children who are still so joyously connected to it. Or perhaps there are others also willing to share their magic. Those persons around me who are inching ever nearer to the magic as the long years of their living come ever nearer to their ending. Driving home from Bert and the Sound at dusk, Mom riding shotgun, I mention, “This is a good time of evening to see bunnies, Mom. Keep your eyes peeled.”

We turn the corner and Mom spots her at once, a fat cottontail smack in the middle of the neighbor’s lawn. And then we see her two smaller companions, the three of them considering us and chewing thoughtfully as we pass. Mom laughs and claps. “Oh Billy, how did you know we’d see bunnies? It’s just like magic!”

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One magic that poetry works is to occupy a different life. In Michael Hettich’s poems, he often seems to occupy several lives, each one exceedingly strange and each entirely commonplace. Through the thirty some years that the poems in this collection occupy, the writer walks around trying on other people’s lives. The surprise of his body may be rivers, trees, dry grass, a child sprouting wings. Bodies may be seedpods or they may burst into flame, they might be figures that dissolve into night or into water. These strange and wonderful transpositions and transformations are not fearful or repulsive – we as readers simply step into these bodies with Michael and become part of the magic.

This is the magic of wildness. Repeatedly, the poems remind us and display for us how wildness is at the heart of each of us. And this is the magic of music, not that the poem uses music to achieve its end but that the noise the world makes is music — poem discovers it and it reveals magic. So many of Michael’s characters sing. Or become song. Those not known for music as well as those whose music we have shut out of our busy non-wild lives. Michael sings, his wife sings, his father and family sing, and the songs weave magic that levitates and elevates and brings joy. When the ringing of my ears and of my machines has deafened me to the everything that makes up this universe of ours – the only known residence, after all, of magic – I know I can return to these poems and be restored.

Today’s post features “Selected” poems from the collection. Also see last week’s post, Catch Fire, which features “New” poems.

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The Frogs

He loved frogs, so he spent his afternoons

wading in the tall grass, or standing in the leafy water

where the stream turned. Charmed by their stories

of woods and muck, he practiced singing with them

at dusk at pond’s edge, while his mother and father

sat talking, with their cocktails, on the porch. As dark fell

his parent called him, most evenings, for dinner,

but sometimes they let him stay down there until the frogs

were hushed by the cicadas, whose conversations

startled him back to himself. He wandered

up to the house through the tall grass, through the dark,

still singing in his own language. Don’t think of him now,

drinking in a city bar, talking to strangers

who ignore him. Don’t think of him walking out into

the empty street, slightly drunk. He’ll be fine.

Think instead of that walk through the dark wet grass,

the sound of a child’s body moving through the grass;

think instead of those frogs falling silent, of that forest,

of mushrooms that push up overnight like elbows

in the moon-drenched mind of the woods.

Michael Hettich

from The Halo of Bees

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House of Light

Someone breaks open like a seedpod or a flower

to spill out across the street, and we all keep walking by

because it is too beautiful to notice, or too frightening,

as the river just moves on, the clothed and dreaming river,

the speaking river feeling just the way it needs to, nothing more.

There are feathers in the sky. Say birds, generic things,

or simply ignore them. But what about those other people

bursting into flame? will the singe you? Step away

from those other fires, as though you weren’t wild yourself

in all the parts that matter: in your blood and vivid thinking, seeing

colors for their secrets: how to move and be and feel

until you burst aflame. Some buildings built of stone are made

to echo now and then, forever – no one can escape –

but others made of wood are filled with window after window,

so many windows you could ever open all of them

in a single lifetime. No one lives that long. But you could open some.

Michael Hettich

from The Halo of Bees

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One By One

Posted in Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged Anita Cantillo, Arielle Hebert, Bill Griffin, Charlotte Lit, imagery, litmosphere, nature, nature photography, nature poetry, NC Poets, Paul Jones, Southern writing on June 23, 2023| 10 Comments »

[with 3 poems from litmosphere

Journal of CHARLOTTE LIT]

Birds Speak to the Women in My Family

This time,

+++++ when a trail of feathers

+++++ +++++ leads me into the forest,

+++++ +++++ +++++ I follow.

Don’t think about where it’s taking me,

only the flightless thing, torn to tufts,

crawling in the underbrush,

but I find no blood, no body.

Whisper of deep woods

Of gifts and pleasures planted and earthed. What was I

so afraid it would say?

I’m here,

+++++ arm full of feathers, unsure

+++++ +++++ which of us is the offering,

+++++ +++++ +++++ which way is home.

My grandmother was told

by an out-of-season swallow

when her mother died.

We have family in town,

my mother says, pointing to a pair of sandhill cranes

stilt walking through the yard.

I’ve collected

+++++ so many feathers.

+++++ +++++ I could be mistaken

+++++ +++++ +++++ for wings.

My mother’s tongue,

her mother’s birdsong

softer with every daughter,

but still a trace, feather by feather

through the old mountains,

disappearing into stone.

Arielle Hebert

❦ ❦ ❦

Chilly for June, but after all sunrise isn’t for another half hour. It’s 5:25 AM and Sharon and I are standing in the Surry County foothills a few miles south of the Virginia line. At 5:30 we’ll begin to count. Last year at this very spot a Chuck-Will’s-Widow fired up and sang for 45 seconds before I’d even started the timer. I counted him anyway.

This year the first voice is a Wood Thrush. Oh, thank you, Audubon’s flute . . . in the summer woods, silver notes pour by the afternoon river. Of all the forest’s music my favorite. Now Catbird, Cardinal, Chipping Sparrow, Indigo Bunting; I call their names when I hear them sing – still too dark to see. Sharon inscribes their presence on our tally sheet. One by one, they fly from mysterious spirit into settled data points.

I didn’t really believe Sharon at first. Back in March she asked me to describe these USGS Breeding Bird Surveys and then said, “Can I come?” Really? Pick you up at 5 AM to drive to our first stop? Then 49 more stops, spaced half a mile apart? Set the timer for 3 minutes, count every bird heard or seen, then back in the car and on to the next? Finish late morning somewhere northeast of Pilot Mountain with Hanging Rock looming? You really want to do that? “Yes! Really! And I’ll bring a picnic!”

Now we’re at Stop 28. Some of the landmark descriptions, established decades ago when these survey routes were first established, are obscure and changeable: overhead power lines and opening in trees. Well, yes, there is a nice opening in the mixed forest, and yes, there’s an Indigo Bunting as expected. Now we hear a Scarlet Tanager, first one of the morning, but these devious birds love to glean insects at the very apex of the canopy and you could crick your neck trying to spot one. Nevertheless there it appears, flitting to the outer branches of a tall loblolly. Brilliant crimson, stark black wings, pausing to snatch a moth then raise beak in its raucous warble. Sharon gasps. “I’ve glimpsed a Tanager before, but I’ve never seen one in the open. Oh my! This is worth the trip!”

And we still have 22 more stops. Not to mention the promise of a picnic at Hanging Rock.

❦

Enter the litmosphere, a universe of writers and readers. The readers may be physically situated anywhere in the world, same for the writers although they must at some time have lived in North Carolina or one if its four bordering states. Today’s poems appear in the second annual edition of litmosphere as winners, finalists, or semi-finalists in this year’s Lit/South Awards.

Charlotte Lit, the Lit/South Awards, and the publication of litmosphere are the brainchildren of Kathie Collins (East Bend, NC) and Paul Reali (Charlotte, NC). In establishing the Charlotte Center for Literary Arts, they are creating a community of writers with a unique definition of Southern, and the poetry, essays, and fiction in this year’s journal speak from a creative realm without boundaries. Place and persona are powerfully freed from constraint. I really could not anticipate where the turn of each page would take me. Ever been welcomed into a gathering that challenges you, surprises you, fills empty spots you didn’t even know you had? And leaves you feeling welcomed and ready for more?

Charlotte Lit, besides its annual contest, offers more than a hundred classes and events every year. Membership information is available here:

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Of Rock Doves

We call these doves pigeons

because they are many

because we once built them cotes

because we collected their guano

because we spread it on melon

patches and near tomato beds

because they bob their heads

in their staggering walk

like professional wrestlers

at the end of their careers

because they can’t see

straight ahead any other way

because they are easily misled

because no matter what

some find their way back home

because when some vanish

there are always many more

because their name is an echo

of the hungry noises

that come from their flimsy nests

because they raid each other’s nests

they kill their neighbors’ young

because they kill their own young

because together in a group

they are called a deuil

which means mourning in French

because we eat their young

because they taste so sweet

and have very small bones

Paul Jones

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When the Universe Told Me You Were Dead

That very morning, the feral cat left

a dead bluebird on my doorstep,

splayed open.

Heart gutted, this remained:

a blood-empty chamber

caged behind delicate, shattered bone.

Newly lifeless, feathers still wet

with morning sky, the orbs of her

eyes set to flight.

Anita Cantillo

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Audubon in the summer woods
by the afternoon river sips
his flute, his fingers swimming on
the silver as silver notes pour

. . .

from Audubon’s Flute by Robert Morgan

[read the entire poem here]

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NOTE: June 19-24, 2023 is NATURALIST WEEK sponsored by Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont. Wherever you are in the world, you can participate in the Naturalist Challenge by spending time outdoors as a naturalist: Pay Attention; Ask Questions; Make Connections; Share. You can also receive a prize if you earn 25 points for your activities! See details here:

. .

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The Breeding Bird Survey is a long-term, large-scale, international avian monitoring program initiated in 1966 to track trends of North American bird populations. There are currently over 4100 courses in the US and Canada, run each spring by volunteer surveyors, and in recent years Mexico has also been added. More than 450 scientific publications have relied heavily, if not entirely, on BBS data; essentially every avian conservation study in North America turns to the BBS in some way.

In the 1960’s, Chandler Robbins and colleagues at the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center were developing survey techniques to monitor populations of hunted birds: Woodcock, Snipe, Mourning Dove. Inspired by Rachel Carson and her publication of Silent Spring in 1962, Robbins realized that larger surveys were needed to document the effects of DDT, as well as other human and non-human variables affecting bird populations. He invented the roadside survey used today: 50 stops plotted on a 24.5 mile course to be counted once a year. The goal is broad longitudinal observation rather than stop-by-stop variation, and the technique for counting in 2023 is the same as in 1966: a single observer, no “pishing” or other enticements to the birds, no apps or electronics, just two ears and field glasses.

I ran my first course in 1995: Copeland, southern Surry County. I’ve counted the course every spring except when BBS shut down for COVID in 2020 (because many courses run through parks and federal lands that were closed to visitors that year). In 2022 I added a second course when it became vacant, Mount Airy in northern Surry County. If you’re interested next year, I’ll pick you up at 5 AM. But Sharon has first dibs.

Bill