ON BIRDSONG

If my readers wish to understand bird-music, they must assume that birds are not automatic musical boxes, but sound-lovers, who cultivate the pursuit of sound-combinations as an art, as truly as we have cultivated our arts of a similarly aesthetic character. This art becomes to many of them a real object of life, no less real than the pursuit of food or the maintenance of a family.

— WALTER GARSTANG, SONGS OF THE BIRDS (1922)

    ON BIRDSONG

    Poison, in proportion, is medicinal.
    Medicine, ill-meted, can be terminal.

    Brute noise, deftly repeated, becomes musical.
    An exit viewed from elsewhere is an entrance.

    The conjuror entrances a vast audience.
    The hymn that's resurrected from the hymnal

    aspires, as we wish to, to the spiritual,
    but is slow to disentangle from the sensual.

    The evening light, refracted, terminates the day.
    (A faction is a fraction of an integral.)

    What would we say to the cardinal or jay,
    given wings that could mimic their velocities?

    How many wintery ferocities
    are encompassed in their shrill inhuman canticles?


    INVENTORY

    Take inventory. Invent a story
    about the people you have hurt.
    Begin with yourself. The harm I've done
    comes on this journey with me. He walks
    ahead on the trail, or follows a dozen
    paces behind. At night we stop
    together. I try not to feel ashamed
    of him, his decaying robes, his loathsome,
    unwashed feet, so much like mine.
    We don't talk much. But two nights ago,
    the campfire dying between us, I found
    I could no longer stifle my rage, I wanted
    to be rid of him so badly, and so
    I mustered my anger and said, You only
    get seven pairs of shoes to carry you
    through this life, and you've already used up
    four. Silence. The call of a whippoorwill
    in the fields. At last he looked up.
    That might be. But know that I'm willing to go
    barefoot at the end, if that's what it takes.


    ACHE AND ECHO

    1

    Anything can be beautiful: a discarded
    Taco Bell wrapper, an industrial park,
    a strip mall, a bloodstain, a bruise, a corpse:

    you just need to see it from the right angle,
    in the right light, and in a spirit
    of equanimity, open-mindedness,

    and receptivity. Isn't this
    what twentieth-century artists were trying
    to tell us? No, they were trying to tell us

    that anything could be art. As for beauty,
    they held it in contempt, they thought beauty
    made us bad people, blind to the plight

    of the poor, to the possibility of change.
    That wasn't their nuttiest notion, either.
    Not by a longshot. But me, I can't

    give up my beauty, I'm an addict, a beauty
    fiend; if you want to take it away
    you're going to have to pry it from my cold dead hands.


    2

    Give back the ache that echoed in
    my heart. Return to me the ache
    and the echo of the ache I felt

    in Orchid Park. Send back to me
    the loose-strung ache that echoed in
    the ark that is my heart. Retrace

    the arc a happy heart might make.
    Sing back to me the song we sang
    in the outer dark, the art we make

    of the ache we felt when we traced the arc
    of the last falling star to fall.
    And stir me, stir me with the spoon

    you used to hide the moon. Then stir
    the echo of my ache. My melody
    has fallen out of tune.


    3

    One: what pleases, what disgusts,
    is only skin deep. Like the beast who becomes
    a handsome man at the end of the film.

    Two: 'tis thinking makes it so.
    What troubles is in the beholder's eye.
    Or should that be the beholden?

    Three: it was born from the womb of death,
    or so it is said. You have met its brothers
    skulking in the bushes with their video recorders.

    Four: it is what truth is, where that
    is all we know, and all we need
    to know. Pretty is as privilege...