Morning birds

Every year, late March, starting at dawn, the cardinal thumps against our basement window, reminding me of a bored bear I saw long ago in a too-small cage–that repetitious sway and stomp–poor thing. But the bird’s unfettered and the window’s behind a large bush, a spindle tree we planted too close to the house–what’s driving that bird? Territoriality? We think perhaps it sees its reflection, so we’ve tried bird scare tape, opening the window, curtaining. Some years there are nests in that bush, but it’s never been cardinals nesting there. Thunk! Thunk!

My son used to stay up playing League of Legends until 3 am in that room, only to be awakened at 5:45 with irritating regularity by “Morning Bird.” He has left the nest, but the bird or its genetically programmed-to-thunk offspring returns annually. So it must be Spring.

Finally we got some good rain, about 3″, but the feeder stream behind our property lies pretty low and swampy after a mostly snowless winter and a dry autumn. Times have been when that stream flowed four feet deeper, rushing to meet Saucon Creek and head to the Lehigh River basin. I walked there this morning looking for frog eggs and salamanders, found two of the latter in a vernal pool where the skunk cabbage drills up from the swamp. Skunk cabbage doesn’t have much of a reputation for beauty but looks lovely with the sun behind its unfurling leaves.

I’m not a birder and can only identify about 25 birds by sight, fewer by sound. I noted mourning doves, mockingbirds and turkey buzzards, robins and redwings as I headed toward the creek. I have loaded Cornell’s “Merlin” bird app on my phone, though, and spent some quiet time sitting back on my heels in the sunshine while recording birdsong. The field sparrows weren’t in the field as yet, but other sparrows were calling: white-throated, song, and house sparrows (the house sparrows love to hide in the thick English ivy bush near the back of our house). Cardinals, of course, house finches, American crow, bluejay, red-bellied woodpecker, hairy woodpecker, tufted titmouse. Deeper in the woods, the white-breasted nuthatch got noisy, and an Eastern phoebe scolded me quite insistently from a beech tree. I was scouting around the largest beeches to see if I could find any dry beechdrop stems, but likely these trees aren’t quite old enough for beechdrops. I was happy to find some partridge-berry leaves, though; ten days ago, when my husband mowed the meadow, he saw a bobwhite–and left some cover standing for it.

I heard the Carolina wren as “Merlin” identified it, and was interested to note the bird app also recorded the presence of black-capped chickadee, bluebird, and Eastern towhee. It’s a bit early for towhees, but I’ve seen them here in past years, usually in April. And just before this recent rainstorm, I spied a killdeer in the meadow. I feel like an amateur naturalist! Anyway, forsythia are blooming. Even if we get more cold spells, I call Spring as having sprung.

~

By 10 am I was assessing the vegetable patch, where I moved a couple of perennial herbs and tore out as much shotweed as I could find. Some winter weeds can stay in the soil for later season removal, but shotweed flowers early, bolts fast, and sends out thousands of seeds so effectively that winter weeding is essential. I can’t keep it out of my lawn, but I can keep it under control in the garden. Redwings, robins, and woodpeckers kept up their calling while I worked. Good to get sun on my hair and dirt under my nails–feels like the first real spring day.

Memento mori

I think I am an amateur naturalist. Maybe my own poetry isn’t so much nature poetry or ecopoetry as it is naturalist poetry. By that I do not mean naturalism as literary criticism defines it–a “movement” belonging to the 19th century. Sean Carroll’s concept of poetic naturalism isn’t quite what I mean, either; Carroll’s approach is more philosophical, though it does get closer to my personal concept. I guess I just mean poetry written by a naturalist.

Such musings arise as I have been reading Bernd Heinrich’s book Life Everlasting: The Animal Way of Death, which offers a naturalist’s low-down on what corporeal death means in terms of the Earth’s environmental cycles; he views every death as a life or as multiple lives–for, in the animal world (which is, after all, our world), a corpse hosts multitudes of new beginnings. It’s simply recycling, the work of millennia. And sometimes the work of Nicrophorus beetles and other “undertakers.” Okay, maybe not a book to every reader’s taste, but fascinating biology. After having read quite a few books on hospice care and human dying, I can now appreciate the amazing biological processes at work in “natural” deaths that work to improve soil, remove waste, feed numerous animals and plants, and regulate the cycle of life. If we want to get ourselves back to the garden, we need to make ourselves more aware of these valuable cleanup crew creatures.

Poets strain experience through words; sometimes we write from the filtered outcome, sometimes we explore the dross that gets caught in the sieve.

A Best Beloved expressed dismay as the news of a friend’s cancer diagnosis coincided with a few recent worries and bereavements: “Everyone’s getting older and falling apart!” But really, what are our options? Die young and leave a good-looking corpse? Live to 100 and die while sleeping? Probably something on the continuum between those poles. Most humans think about, or endeavor not to think about, their deaths and the deaths of those they love. Grief and death are among the Big Themes of poetry, often hovering in the background of a poem that initially appears to be about something else (i.e. Emily Dickinson Emily Dickinson Emily Dickinson 😀 …). Poets strain experience through words; sometimes we write from the filtered outcome, sometimes we explore the dross that gets caught in the sieve. All of it is life.

“Remember we must die” need not be a call to religious fervor or to pessimistic existentialism. It is merely a fact that we ignore at our peril; for if we remember death is ahead, we can attune ourselves more closely to the lives we do have–and those others with whom we are in relationships. For whether you know it or not, your body has a relationship to Earth and all of its beings. Even, perhaps, the carrion beetle, not to mention billions of microbes and your best friend’s mother.

When I write about death (and I do), I find the tone of the poem depends a great deal on which words or images I use: the clear flow, or the leavings in the sieve. Different purposes, of course. Sometimes the poem wanders in sorrow, sometimes there’s clarity or a lifting of grief. It depends on the perspective (sometimes the speaker of the poem isn’t me), and on where the poem itself decides to go, particularly as I revise. Many readers believe that poems only ever arise from the writer’s experience, but poems are works of the imagination. And they are sometimes informed, or re-formed, by experience or insight that comes later in the writing process.

My own grief? That’s private. I may not decide ever to communicate how that feels. However, having sensed sorrow in my bones and gut and in the empty places in my community of loved ones, I can write about being in the moment of bereavement and the many moments afterwards when the losses make us ache. I like to imagine that memento mori keeps me alert to life. Even when I feel sad.