SPARROW ENVY
Copyright © 2021
J. Drew Lanham
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
Cover Illustration: © Tristan Kronopawiro
Proofreaders: Kendall Owens, Betsy Teter
Editor: John Lane
Printed in Chelsea, Michigan by Sheridan Books
An earlier, prose version of “9 Rules For the Black Birder” appeared in Orion, Nov./Dec. 2013, orionmagazine.org.
A shortened version of this book was first printed in 2016 by Holocene Publishing in Spartanburg, South Carolina.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Lanham, Drew, author.
Title: Sparrow Envy: A Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts : poems J. Drew Lanham.
Description: Spartanburg, SC : Hub City Press, 2021.
Identifiers:
LCCN 2020047490
ISBN 978193823581-8 (paperback)
ISBN 978193823582-5 (ebook)
Subjects: LCGFT: Poetry.
Classification: LCC PS3614.O23 C58 2021 | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020047490 (edited)
Hub City Press gratefully acknowledges support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Amazon Literary Partnership, South Arts, and the South Carolina Arts Commission.
Manufactured in the United States of America
First Edition
HUB CITY PRESS
200 Ezell Street
Spartanburg, SC 29306
864.577.9349 | www.hubcity.org
Contents
BIRDS
Considering Birds
Field Mark 3: Wood Thrush ID (Made Simple)
On Timberdoodle Time
Murmuration
Sparrow Envy
Field Mark 8: Necessary Greed
Octoroon Warbler
No Murder of Crows
Thrush Lust
Migration
Icterid Indecision
A Dream of Swans
Nocturne
Duck Hawk
Wren REM
Egg Blues
Home from Guatemala (No Walls Here)
LESSER BEASTS
Weed Worship
Field Mark 52: Reclamation
Lifeless List
Field Mark 2: Awegasm
/LUV/
Field Mark 25: Dum Spiro Spero
Field Mark 6: Love Handle
Hard Pan Life
Sound Thinking
Migration
On Finding Swamp Religion
Chiricahua Dreaming
Compassing
Buffalo Trace
Soulful Warming
Field Mark 73: How to Just Be
Covey of One
Gravity (Always Wins)
Non-stationary Cycling
Back Road
Field Mark 5: How Not to Watch Birds
Bohicket Road Ramble: Flash Fry Gentrify
Field Mark 1: Love for a Song
On Considering the Holocene with White Men
Field Mark 17: Good Enough
Field Mark 3: In Remembrance (Auto Obit)
Deer Worship
Field Mark 11: Sunset Camp
MEANINGS & REGULATORY RAMBLE
i. Nine Rules for the Black Birder
ii. How to Adore Birds
iii. Group Think: New Names for Plural Birds
iv. Glossary
BIRDS
CONSIDERING BIRDS
A heron waits at the water’s edge—wondering.
Wade or wait—fish or not?
No multitudes to satisfy—no flock to feed.
Just one lone long-legged-longing thing.
Choose wisely wader,
wish and want won’t will the hunger away.
Had I wings to fly how far would I wander? How high?
It is tasked to earthbound souls like mine
to worry over flight—
or falling.
A sparrow sings the knowing
a feather’s lift is faith enough.
FIELD MARK 3: WOOD THRUSH ID (MADE SIMPLE)
It’s not so much about identifying what birds are, as feeling who birds are. Head nods, jaw drops, smiles, tears and abject adoration, are all “feel marks” for identifying the wood thrush—a brown-backed, forest-singing soul seldom seen, but more often heard and felt deeply. As this bird pumped its heart out in auto three-part harmony, the one inside my own chest stopped beating for a while.
ON TIMBERDOODLE TIME
Yesterday, on twilight’s descent to dark—a chord of woodcocks spiraled upward through descending night. Venus winked—called the stars out one by one. The wall-eyed birds fell back to earth “peenting” and twittering all the way down. The brushy tangle crackled behind me and a grunt from deep within some burly antlered thing “uur-ped” out. Night coming means pulse quickening when lives are at stake. How will my fortune define another’s fate? Bucks wander in search of woo. I am watching and wanting too. Woodcock spiraling, white-tails wandering, solace growing. My grip on the death deliverer loosened. My heart listened to the moonlit music. In the quest called hunting there is more to gather than venison. Cold descended with the woodcocks’ rising. My soul simmered in the moment’s melding. There is no expectation beyond what leftover light illumes. It is timberdoodle time.
MURMURATION
a wave of dark birds
surges
a black feathered river
rustles
flows on eventide
undulates tree-line to horizon
soot-washed
smudged on day-failing sky
does full moon’s waning
pull restless flock to roost?
shortening time fails its own patience
to offer response
as heart’s glow pulses brighter in bittering cold
SPARROW ENVY
Were I the sparrow
brown-backed skittish and small—
I would find haven
in thorniest thickets—
search far and wide for fields lain fallow
treasure the unkempt
worship the unmown
covet the weed-strewn row
I would slink
between sedges
chip unseen from brambles
skulk deep within hedges
and desire the ditches grown wild
I would find great joy
in the mist-sodden morning
sing humble pleas
from the highest weeds
and plead
for the gray days to stay
FIELD MARK 8: NECESSARY GREED
Gluttony. All along it was gluttony. The shadow bird, the olive-backed spiral song slinger; the Swainson’s thrush skulking haint-like in my sideyard thicket for the past few days—was likely drawn down from northbound migratory flight to rest, and to secure food. Fuel for the journey and ground time to reset. This in itself, was not news. It is what migratory birds do. But how did it know there was a bounty waiting in my Piedmont neighborhood? Was there some signal—an aroma wafting in the air? A glimpse of fruit from on high? A memory from last year? Some mysteriously mystically evolved avian super sense? Was there some voice that said—“Stop here”?
I’ll never know ultimate bird motivation, and so I’ll continue to guess. The reason for my buffy-cheeked guest’s lingering, I suspect, is the limbs hanging heavy with purple blackberries.
Just as the waxwings, robins, red-bellied woodpeckers, summer tanagers, and squi
rrels discovered, it was drawn in, or at least bribed to stay, by berries. And so as it sang this evening, threw that wheezy hornpipe of a song skyward, I wondered if it was a pre-flight zugunruhe-driven plan. And then watching it dart furtively from dark thicket into failing light to pluck a quick bite—I realized that hyperphagy might be the motivator in the moment. Greed feeds need. That’s my thumbnail hypothesis as I wonder how much longer it will remain. If indeed my assumption is valid of this bird today being the same as the one earlier observed.
In any case, I’m happiest here today, on this bit of fragmented, non-native plant overrun, feral-
cat-filled, over-developed land. Happy that my postage stamp piece of Anthropocene-inflamed
earth provides some relief; some sustenance for the longer journey to come.. A fruit-filled, fattening, fighting chance for a barely-seen bird I’ve come to almost love.
OCTOROON WARBLER
As a taxonomic committee of one,
I alone have decided
that the past transgressions of long ago dead and rotted
bird watchers must be amended.
That it is my sole responsibility—and pleasure—
to right the wrongs
of racist slave-holding artist ornithologists.
of genocidal complicit naturalists.
of grave-robbing skull-fondling phrenologists.
of the lot of white-supremacist men with the
self-serving penchant
for naming things after themselves.
I hereby declare my solo vote singularly unanimous.
Everything I decide here and now—
passes.
So shall it be written. Let it be done.
Word is bond.
My opinions good as any other treaty
signed in the shifting sand of time.
I do hereby exchange, alter or replace
the names of the birds that follow.
Their former identities by patriarchal rule to be expunged.
That they should have new identities
by my demand.
Bachman’s sparrow, denizen of long-leaf pine savannah;
of wiregrass, of fire-kissed sandy ground
shall be once again be
“pine woods.”
A true great again recovery worthy of celebration!
And whilst I’m releasing species from bondage,
consider the likely forever gone warbler
of the same Charleston preacher’s
human-chattel-possessing label,
can we not do better?
Yes.
“Swamp Cane warbler,”
appropriately by design of damp dank place
it so chose when still in existence, escaping notice.
I would have suggested “Tubman’s warbler,”
but then why make it any easier to erase blackness
when extinction has already done the job?
LeConte’s Sparrow will hence forward be
“orange-faced.”
The brown-backed secretive skulker
of wet weedy rank with tangled overgrown fields,
hider in thickety traces, deserves better fate than linkage
to a Confederate armorer working
to put in place a permanent apartheid nation.
Townsend’s Solitaire,
thrush-esque thing of western slope migration
is now “Up-and-Down Solitaire.”
Mobile altitudinal propensity
taken into full account.
The lemon yellow-headed black and white
western jewel of a warbler
tagged by that same Indian grave-robbing man,
shall now be a “Doug Fir” specifically,
known for its tie to evergreen boughs.
No disarticulated Native heads required.
To correct an oversight
of Manifest Destiny,
(and opening the western door to indigenous genocide
not accepted),
behold Clarke’s Nutcracker,
the capacious resourceful intelligent corvid,
given title by the fire-haired Captain of the Corps!
Henceforth shall be York’s Crow.
Designated the first bird so named for a man of color
About damn time the brother got credit
for saving the Corps of Discovery’s always imperiled bacon.
Even as property his contributions went largely
without merit.
To even the score a bit more
redact the other leader Lewis
from the northern Rockies woodpecker.
He of Trail of Tears Cherokee removal infamy.
Christen the gorgeous picid Sacagawea’s Woodpecker
instead.
As for John James Audubon,
“JJ,” if I might?
He of the posed painted birds,
of ego larger than life to go along
with his Baby Elephant folio.
What does a slave-owning,
man-passing for white might deserve?
What might the demigod of birdome merit
after all these years?
Let his name now be struck.
For malfeasance to humanity.
For being prickish and a generally abhorrent man,
Audubon’s orioles shall be Rio Grande.
The sea-going petrel with the artist’s moniker shall now be
“Warm-Sea Wanderer.”
An identity worthy of its tropic-trotting status.
And last but not least, for review
the yellow-rumped warbler of occidental “race,”
occurring beyond the Mississippi to points beyond that.
Since Johnny couldn’t bear the very thought
of interracial miscegenation,
let’s call the butter-butted bird what it is
in hindsight of his own mixed-raced denial.
The Octoroon Warbler.
Thus, I proclaim on this very day,
whenever this ruling shall be read on whatever future date,
that we remember the identity of the birds for what they are,
and never forget the sins of past imperfections too,
to not repeat the hubris of taking good for granted.
But letting creatures have their own names.
No interference from haters required.
NO MURDER OF CROWS
I watched a flock of crows
fly by,
counted forty-two black souls, then up to sixty-five,
maybe more.
Not sure whether fish or ’merican
They were silent as coal,
headed to roost I assumed,
a congregation I refused to call a murder
because profiling ain’t what I do:
besides,
they was just flyin’ by.
No cause to criminalize the corvid kind.
THRUSH LUST
A thrush
would rather
you have it
in pieces.
Eye
for
purple berry.
Tawny throat dawn’s first
hidden shadow.
Moss olive brown back blending
fawn spotted breast
into
dappled evening light
tumbled
through September’s
fatigue green
failing.
It is a jigsaw puzzled thing
until a ripening want calls,
—hangs—
Tempts.
Hidden form revealed cannot resist
what begs taking.
Is whole until
the mystery thinks better
of what it knows itself
to be.
A secret whisper on night wind
fades quiet into imagining.
Fragments
scattered. to. past. tense.
; A hushed wish,
un-
believed.
MIGRATION
what thoughts ramble
in the redstart’s brain
as the day draws closed
as dusk descends?
is it larval fuel to lay on fat?
a steady southbound wind?
perhaps it’s the flicker
of unseen light
the lure of tropical terrain
is it the flight plan hard-wired—
instinct etched in
by design not likely to change?
or does some warbler learned plan B
come into play
by circumstance rearrange?
fare thee well little bird
may stars bright guide you true
to thicket lush
past falcon’s rush
through dark skies inky blue
it’s my hope
that neither cat
nor glass
will spell your odyssey’s end
but that your tiny wings
some luck
some skill
will bring you back
to inspire me
once again
ICTERID INDECISION
A give and take
between field and forest.
An ebb of grackles; a flow of blackbirds
hordes of blackness,
back and forth from tree-naked crown
to bare ground.
A tide of feathers high
then low.
A flood loosed over weeds died to brown,
covering crops gone to seed.
Sunflower heads bowed to their yellow God
hidden for the day behind clouds.
Then—
as if a single soul among the tens of thousands
(I never counted)
found inspiration
imagined itself the lone wheel;
the pivot in a swirling, sweeping design
of legions in unison flying—
gave by rusty hinged call
(or some icterid whispered sign
only understood by the black-plumaged kind)
the command.
But lacking conviction,
as many but not all flew in gathered mass,
A sphere half—pulsing
rushed to rising
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