If it is doubt which I see there in the sandpiper’s eye as it hurries along the mountain beach in Spring, an injured wing held tight but fanning down at a pained angle, feet moving in an aimless-as-ever, wandering hunt, skitter-stop and shivering on, looping back, circuitous, to where it had been a moment before, what then does it say about worry and fear and loneliness?  Its home is not here, where it finds itself alone, if anywhere ever wasn’t its home.  Its steps barely disturb the grains beneath them so that there is hardly even a footprint for the waves to erase but they come anyway, in firm rhythm, to set the sand back to its order.  The small bird cannot know any longer if it will make it to where it is going, if it knew where that was when it began, but there is hardly a difference in its movements from others of its kind, only a slackened wing and a vague quiver, possibly imagined, in those black little eyes.  And, except under a higher grace, what does the world care about a sweet, brave insubstantiality such as this?

Above and around, the swallows dip, glide, and arc out across the still water of the marsh behind the piper and I, banking up where their iridescence catches the sun, flaming an unnamable blue and twisting over into a keen crescent of gray and white, slipping on behind the budding willows, swooping down to drink on the wing among last year’s brittle reeds, or spiriting up into the suddenly empty sky.  Even when they come to rest for a moment, fearless pilots alighted on the nearby fence’s thin wires, hesitation never seems to trouble their head.  What must they ask themselves, if anything, when it is time for them to sleep?

A movement of mine and the roused head of a Flicker spikes up from the old grass that’s been wind-pressed into waves. The small flames of its feathers fan out for a moment as its wings wheel over in retreat, leaving behind no trace of its flight.  Still, near me, here and there, caught up in that yellowed green sea or clung to the husks of old flowers and thistles, can be seen a few lonely feathers kept from slipping away.  From owners all different and departed, here’s one weathered grey by the winter and formed to the ground where it fell; nearby a small scattered circle of russet-striped white, clipped and scored at the shafts by a powerful beak; and just one more tethered there to a dry stem of mullein, dancing alive, with both vanes shining black as it turns in the breeze.  Scattered pieces then discarded but what beauty is it in them that they still seem to feel the lack of whatever free thing left them behind?

The air, for the moment, is absent of swallow flight, holding only a few thin cirrus strands.  But one cannot call it lonely with the screech-song call and response of the yellowheads from the tops of long-crumbled cattails, the questioning song of the Sora hidden in the heart of the willows, or the competing chorus of the redwings’ high trills.  It’s only sometimes out here, where answers seem certain, that I ask what I’m meant to be learning and fill myself up with a worry which I hardly know how to name.  Far out on the marsh, a tern curves skyward out of the growth- black-headed, sharp, white, and circling out over the spread of calm waters before it.  Behind me, the piper can no longer be seen, and I know what I hope but it’s off and away on a secret trajectory whose end can only be guessed.  The tern hover-hunts now, holding midair, wings quick doubled up, then splaying out to the sun like the fair spirit of rising itself though its eyes are fixed down on something below.  And I’ll swear to you here, before it occurs, that emptiness never truly exists, that renewal is inevitable if sometimes elusive, and that the lame wing of doubt can be healed if only to convince my own nervous heart.  It takes just a sudden, subtle tuck of the pinion beneath and a fluid lean down into a long, scything dive to send up that shimmering splash from which arise both the tern and its wriggling catch.  Still, I don’t know what to tell you about what has been lost or what never was but- whether that same lonely fear is lodged in the fish, a part of the sharp grace which lifted it up, or living quite strong in both lives at once- I cannot trace it exact but somehow it must be all raggedly bound with the old, beautiful hope which makes up the marsh where the blooms are not back, nor even the buds, but the green shoots of life are returning and, wherever its feathers may drift, that little piper will be safe-- I know in my blood.

 

  

I think
sometimes
about how a pine
must stay
where it is placed.
How it cannot free
its heart
and that the heartwood 
always hardens first,
helping it to stand.

Without asking why,
it makes of itself
a home for all things
plain, beautiful, or
only
just necessary;
scatters its prayers 
on winds
and draws what it needs
from where it's rooted.

Pushing itself so,
maybe
the lead bud is lost,
it grows haywire and 
higher,
raising up then what
it's chosen to bear,
thinking of nothing,
just continued, blind
giving.

So what 
if bark goes brittle
and the needles brown,
that it feels itself fall
and gives 
over to rot from
within.
It does so at peace, 
on the side of life
only.

By it
other lives spring up
every green which way
but what does it get
from losing itself?
I mean
it was quite noble
but where 
is the wild romance
in that?

It's the song I've been trying to sing...

There was the lonely pine on one side and the willow sticks bare on the other, with you just behind as I crouched there in the snow over that scatter of feathers-- dappled, yellow-tipped, and mingled with the red of life recently taken.  There was little trace of the vanished raptor aside from the blood which had dripped from its beak, and it had taken the larger part of its meal with it when it flew.  As you joined me in that small cloister picking through the shafts and down, I wondered if you felt it too--the need for some connection which I still couldn't then name or understand.  The hawk's feather, a mark left by the wings, or the outline of a talon in the snow-- I would have taken anything then and everything else had receded.

We had found the lake shifting calmly on that dim winter's morning after days of storms, the water sighing up to the snow-banked shores and breathing back out.  A mallard pair drifted lazily across the glassy, dark surface ahead and a gull wheeled lazily beneath the low-hung stratus.  To our left the cheery noise of a feeding flock enlivened the willow bushes and the pines above.  We tried to follow their quick movements and pick out the ones we knew: Ruby-crowned Kinglets, Dark-eyed Juncos, Mountain Chickadees and Yellow-rumped Warblers, here a Steller's Jay, there a Robin, and beyond them the year's first trilling of Red-winged Blackbirds.  With flicking tail feathers, in nimble dives and hops, they went about their foraging with little songs, making a haphazard chorus which flowed and trailed and then subtly rose into an agitation we hadn't understood at the time.

It was then, from behind, that the bird-scream broke from a throat made for singing as we turned to see the outstretched wings pulling back and the kicking stretch of the talon seizing a Meadowlark with desperate grace.  There was a feral control in the young hawk's strike, the sharp driving down into the clearing of snow, and the adamant holding there beneath the mantling wings.  In the background, seeming far away, a few Jays scolded and all the smaller birds called out in alarm as the feathers were sliced and torn in small brown tufts let drift across the sparkling white with, here and there, a downy yellow tip catching the light.

I, of course, did not see the spirit leave the lark.  There was only the stilled reach of its wingtips fanning up out of the snowy crater towards the mantling wings of the hawk as if to ward off its fate.  Then there was simply the small bursts of feathers, and the slick red of the hunter's hooked beak as it came up from that hollow of snow.  The lark had been a creature of the tall grass, sand, willows and sage.  Wild, beautiful, and now gone-- it was being taken up into the heart of another, more fierce beauty.  Likely neither had eaten much for days due to the storms and such a thing is hunger that it had led them to each other, one driven careless and the other single-minded.

It must have been that inner gnawing which made the little hawk tolerant enough to share that clearing which now seemed at the very center of things.  In the stratus-diffused morning light its eyes flared with the saffron of its youth as it alternately scanned for trouble and quickly put its beak down to the ruined black V over those lemon feathers and the spreading salmon and scarlet of its work.  And I wondered what that hawk knew of peace in the life given to it.  Would it be a vague meaning hidden somewhere between a full stomach, the cessation of scolding and calls of alarm, the wind and sun on outspread wings, the breeze and the tremble of dappling shade over a secluded perch? Or maybe its peace was simply and only here, in the hunt and its culmination.  With its spirit as dilated and focused as its pupils, it could have been most alive in the headlong diving through branches, the sharp finality of the strike and its strewn-feather coda.  And then it was also possible that, in a way
I little understand, from first fledging it knew nothing but peace in all the movements of its life so long as they carried it ever forward.

And what can be said of the Meadowlark?  It had hatched who-knows-when from its brown-splotched egg in the nest made for it of the same grass where it would grow, learning to fly and to hide, to sing and to hunt.  It must have spent all summer and fall foraging along hidden paths among the willows, spiking its head up towards the sun from the sea of beach grass, and singing brave from the fence posts or sage tips its whistling song against rivals and for any female in earshot.  Or maybe it had been the one listening, its interest piqued by the song of another as it started to think of building its own nest in the grass.  And what should it mean that it met its end violently at the dim tail of a vast winter in the talons of a famished hawk?  Where should we find the notion of peace in the rising of its partially stripped and reddened body, seized up out of that clearing of snow and carried a short distance, gliding to that lonely hollow between willow and pine?  Would its spirit have then lingered plaintively, sung out in some bittersweet species of joy, or just slipped off unspeakably silent and gentle into the land it had always known?

The hawk had savored its work for a while in seclusion then, picking and rending more carefully now, before it abruptly rose with its meal and flickered out of sight.  As the two of us bent under those branches and over the feathers, what came back to me first was the great lake nearby, gently meeting that small strip of sand which the wind and water themselves had brought down from the mountains.  Worn from the granite then sifted and rushed down streams and falls and out into the open, the unceasing waves had lapped it back onto the beach over thousands of years.  When viewed in its own scale, this same weather may have violently scoured the ridges and peaks and ripped these same grains of sand down from the heights to the valley, their cycles entwined, creating and breaking down in the same action and meeting here simply on a different turn of the wheel.  Life and its opposite surely have their courses as well, meeting in a multitude of different formations, partnerships, and oppositions which only seem wilder because they can more clearly be seen.  This hawk had met that meadowlark in the winter morning light, one beauty now carrying another, and they had both continued on in their own particular ways.  I could not see a true end to any of it at all and it was maybe that connection which I was searching for in the snow.  Wasn't there the promise in these things that damage can be redeemed, that from ugliness can come beauty, that meaning is always there whether we see it or not?

I am sure that every living thing hears those waves too as a constant refrain and, though it must be different for each of them, there has to be something in it of the heartbeat of their world, sometimes wildly pounding and then sure and serene as though there was a certain, unshakable peace running through it, deeper and without fear.  When you looked back out from under the branches, I did too.  And all around the clearing each little bird was again taking up their part in the ever-changing chorus, hopping and flitting, now and again stretching their small wings to wheel out in an arcing path through the slowly brightening sky-- little circles in a larger turning.

 

 

 

Upper Truckee Marsh, January 30th

You won't see the gull fly but can still hear its call
with the world closed in pogonip, simple and small.

It's all dim-lit somehow, though still thoroughly white.
Just hoarfrost on willow sticks in gently chill light.

You'll sink steps through deep snow to that crescent of sand
and the murmuring swell of the lake come to land.

Still half-held in sleep, geese just drift out of the fog.
They float and they dabble in peaceful dialogue

Which you can't understand but can follow its tone,
Stood only glad to be here and not here alone

While each plash and ripple talks to each quiet wave
And those black, wary eyes wonder how you'll behave.

Conjunct and quiet, you are then part of it too,
That plain melody of day reduced and made new.

You cannot define it though its right at the fore.
You still heard it inside, walking back down the shore

While the mist started to clear as if from a spell
And slow from the willows, the ice crystals fell.

Was the day brightening then or being obscured?

Soon that small, delicate song might no longer be heard.

And if it goes silent, can it still be a refrain?
Because maybe the answer might help to explain

 Why you would see, walking home in that second dawn,

 A once playful raven chasing after a swan.