Sparrow Envy

by J. Drew Lanham

  a single shushing of millions of feathers pinioning

  one against another

  and the other multiplied over and over

  and over.

  Swushing again to swishing

  then a single turn

  as if to grow to something greater.

  Collapsed to quiet.

  Just a murmur.

  Silence—

  save the conversation

  over consumption.

  All in the uprising settled back to indecision.

  The tide recedes.

  Forest to field

  then back again.

  A DREAM OF SWANS

  I saw their pale feathered forms flying through the glow of a waxing moon. I could feel their wild hearts’ murmurings; I longed as they did for other places far away but close to heart. I took flight in that swan dream. I took flight and sailed with kindred spirits over salt marsh and fallow field. The earth—landscapes sprawled in space and flattened in time—passed beneath the folding and unfolding of my wings. I was of it all and yet not a part of any that was. I murmured too. I murmured a sweet and sad swan song whispering in the way that wild winged things do of wanderings and wanting and wishing for the felt—but unseen. In my dream flight my wings whooshed and my voice was no longer my own and my swan soul moaned and the peeping frogs peeped from their ponds and the tide rose and fell on the ocean’s swell because desire deemed it so. In that swan dream as I flew across the waxing bay moon my breast ached with strokes urgent rowed against imagined sky and yet when I woke—I found that I did not fly.

  NOCTURNE

  Overhead

  I heard the night songs

  of thrushes

  the trills

  the thrips and wurps

  of brown backed birds

  with hopes hitched to stars,

  flying on faith of light in the dark.

  Unseen—

  but for the sound of them above

  cleaving ink black sky,

  millions of souls riding the wind

  to some other world.

  I thought them at first dreams

  but for the words they left

  in echoes of their wings.

  DUCK HAWK

  for J.A. Baker

  Almost faster than I could see

  or follow through the clear air

  with bare human eyes,

  a peregrine streaked.

  Beyond flying,

  it was projectile

  more than feathered thing.

  It circled and swooped in figure eights—

  a blur hurtling earthward

  stooping in a wing-folded dive.

  Then suddenly skyward in an arcing

  climb over the line it just traced,

  ignoring gravity

  in the sinuous movement up

  defying the pull to ground,

  it rose

  then dove again

  and then once more ascended

  on infinite repeating line.

  All the while its wings never moved more than to compress

  and make it a taloned dart

  or opened swept back as check-sail

  steering it into perfect turn.

  The work looked easy

  the bird rode the wind,

  never flapping.

  I watched with tearing eyes unbelieving—unblinking.

  The falcon screamed.

  I felt the wild deep within

  and counted it

  like the perfect curves

  carved above the valley floor

  sine of infinite hope

  a fear of living to overcome.

  WREN R. E. M

  fleeting dreams

  pass on morning’s first light

  mist lifting off a mental bridge to nowhere probable—

  but all points beyond possible

  reality is the wren that wakes to each sun’s rising

  with only the moment before it

  no plans to skulk

  or explore the next darkest crevice or crack

  it sings heart-full to the limits of the bounds it knows—

  the rotting woodpile in the northeast corner

  the honeysuckle tangle westward

  satisfied in that half acre universe

  it sings to meet the day

  tucks its wings satisfied in some second of accomplishment

  it scolds a plan

  and flits away

  a wanderer in the present tense

  future perfect does not exist

  the past makes little sense

  that I should live as wisely as wrens

  is lesson one

  carpe diem ad infinitum

  EGG BLUES

  Nature versus nurture.

  Or so the dichotomy allegedly goes.

  The hard-wired instinct of our base being—

  blamed on genes.

  While the learning and exposure

  of our surroundings casts shadows

  on our gnarled and twisted family trees.

  Who takes care of whom?

  Knows the itches to scratch?

  Can find the place where you retreat

  within your own wildness to escape—

  but leave you there trusting you’ll return?

  The right or wrong questions to ask?

  It’s all a matter of timing—

  the who and what of our when-ness.

  The birds find their own answers to these questions.

  Simply living by codes we can’t quite figure out

  except to guess, really.

  I’m okay with not knowing it all, these days.

  Five cerulean eggs lain warm in a cup fashioned

  of pine straw and rootlets wound just so

  are proof of my human built conceit.

  Who taught them this?

  The old box hung tenuously on a fence post with no roof.

  Dangerously exposed.

  Evidence of some bluebird genius faith

  unmeasurable by us?—Or is it some sign of persistence?

  Maybe an ill-fated nesting move?

  The choice has been made beyond my ego grade.

  And so for today I’ll just take it as a sign

  of Sialia sialis love.

  I move on to watch a sparrow throw its head back,

  and sling its buzzy song into the morning wind

  All of the questions I never answered just moments ago

  have just begun again.

  HOME FROM GUATEMALA (NO WALLS HERE)

  the neighborhood wood thrush somehow

  found its way back through tempests

  past talons

  over sea and stopover that used to be

  it found the struggling woodlot

  —home again—

  a few acres of oaks and tulip poplars loblolly pines

  everywhere

  dogwood and redbuds scatter-blooming underneath

  all of it suffocating slowly in kudzu choking on

  privet

  swarmed over with hungry neglected tabby cats

  cowbirds waiting

  for evolutionary welfare this evening

  though

  I forgot all the imperfections when the wood

  thrush returned and the notes drifted

  through me

  it slung its song straight into my heart the harmony

  it made with itself

  hung onto heaven pierced my

  soul brought back love

  from a place I’d never known

  LESSER BEASTS

  WEED WORSHIP

  summer senesces

  salidago glows

  bidens explodes

  glimmering sunlight

  gilds saffron shadows

  beauty

  overruns rank ditches

  spills down ragged shoulders

  graces forgotten lanes

  warmth seeps down

  slanting

>   cutting hours shortening days

  wallowing in my own equinox

  change creeps inward

  pulls heartward

  shifts desire to overdrive

  before will withers

  FIELD MARK 52: GESTALT

  A warmer winter day—I revisited the scalped clearcut that’s presently wearing a scraggly scruff of scrubby weeds and stumps. I wandered noisily through the tangles, stepping up on the amputated remains of a slain sylvan giant every now and again to get the lay of things and to see who else might be wandering. Bluebirds seem to relish the new open floor plan. They gather in flocks this time of year flashing shades of cobalt against an otherwise bleak canvas of what was. Odd how trees hide hills and holes that only become evident once they’re gone.

  I made it down to the farthest edge of the bare block today and found hope where the foresters wisely left the hardwood buffer alongside the river. After the satisfying act of tearing apart a poacher’s stand, I found an old metal ladder perch that I’d put in the little bottom some five or six years ago, hoping to try and outsmart the old antlered king I’d seen signs of in the privet hell. Finding my stand in the harvest aftermath was like finding a piece of home after a storm has tossed everything else asunder. I climbed up, watched a sharp-shinned hawk recycle some unfortunate songbird and listened to the lucky trees that were left talking in leaf rattle to the river rushing by.

  The land laid bare behind me was the same place where the pretty ten-point buck came in to my calling almost a year ago. He was nose-to-ground in doe seeking mode. I stumbled upon him, wandering on the far edge of the eighty or so acres that had been liquidated. A favorable wind and a glint of antler in late morning sunlight gave him away. A few grunts and bleats later—careful aim through the hyperventilation and the concentrated contraction of my index finger against the spring-taught metal sickle reduced curiosity to fatal flaw.

  The nearly sixty pounds of venison the buck sacrificed are nearly gone now, but my memories of him, the hunt and how this place once thick with forest—but now denuded except for stumps, sneeze weed, and sweetgum sprouts—haunts me. Yes, the forest will regrow, and yes—the stunted pines, winged elm and tangles of sweetgum needed a new start for the landowner to gain enough financial ground to hold on to the land. But because hundred-year-old beeches, thick-trunked maples, and understory consorts of dogwood and ironwood got taken to the chip mill too, I was saddened.

  Sitting high today in what remains lessens some of the loss. Proof I suppose that there’s redemption to be gained even in the bleakest of circumstances.

  LIFELESS LIST

  Do you know

  how hard it is

  to admire plumage on a bird?

  To separate one warbler chip note

  from another?

  Or count

  the telltale hind wing spots

  on a butterfly?

  Or remember the name of a wildflower

  seen a hundred times?

  Or gather the energy to find the

  Latin binomial of a beetle in a field guide?

  Or even give a fuck what the name

  of anything is

  beyond the last Black body that

  lay still after being murdered

  by the police?

  I can no longer keep track

  of the last hurricane that blew in from the earth’s rising heat.

  Of the last tweet inciting riot.

  The last fire that burned and burned

  and burned.

  Of the hundreds of thousands of infected and dead.

  It is a sad exhausting lifeless list I’d rather not keep,

  growing longer by the hour.

  There’s little room left in my heart these dark days

  for listing anything.

  Hardest task comes

  in not becoming a member

  of a litany of dread.

  FIELD MARK 2: AWEGASM (N.)

  The quasi-erotic, para-sensual overwhelm of the senses, especially in response to nature and non-human beings or the associated phenomena of wildness such as the flight of an otherworldly bird (e.g. swallow-tailed kite), a heart-rending saltmarsh sunset bleeding through dusk, a Blue Ridge mountain sunrise peeling through holler rising fog, or a waxing gibbous moon interrupted by tundra swan flight. It may result in the oozing of unintelligible words of joy and bliss with the spurt-eruption of expletives at eco-climax. Tears and uncontrolled laughter may occur simultaneously. See also dewkist, feralize, fern-fondling (fiddleheading), lunar lust, treehug, wanton-wander.

  LUV

  Love,

  is the feathered thing

  tundra swan flying

  across full moon’s cold light

  wood thrush

  singing deep

  in redbud blushing spring

  wing of wandering owl

  sweeping arctic white

  Love,

  is the wild place

  windswept shore

  where tide tosses time

  cypress swamps ink wet reflection

  old field languishing

  broom-sedge burnishing gold

  in autumn setting sun

  Love,

  is humid summer

  lust crush

  cicada’s humming choir

  leaf’s first blush—

  verdance

  to vermilion warblers wandering

  by guiding star

  FIELD MARK 25: DUM SPIRO SPERO

  In these up and down days of fear. Of exhausting stress. Of breaking strain. Of questions unanswered. Of discord. Any comfort reliably, infallibly yet comes in the sun resting westward and leaving light that stops my heart and makes it beat all the more rapidly at once. It comes in the birds still remaining, hurtling themselves across the face of a waxing moon journeying to places better than here. I envy them in that courage to go where they must: in an obedience to follow wandering’s pull. In these things I can rest my waning faith. It is not in any being of rumored omniscience or in four-walled religion beyond earth and sky and day and night—and those beasts and hours that fall in between what we can see or what we might believe.

  Until such time as the sun ceases to set in the west or migrating birds no longer ply dark heaven following guiding stars, I hope. I watch. I breathe.

  FIELD MARK 6: LOVE HANDLE

  Handle any life in your hands as if it were your own. Feel the heart beating—small as it may be—and imagine it in your own chest: beating in syncopated time to become shared meter. That pulse, the breathing, is your rhythm. Your in’s and out’s: its in’s and out’s. Look close under whatever warty skin or soft fur or gaudy feathers and see self. Its being is your being. Be in that same skin for what moments it will allow. Then, when the convergence between you is sealed, release that wild soul to free roaming as you would desire of your own.

  HARD PAN LIFE

  I once watched a mule team, hitched collar to harness to yoke to plow, strain and heave as the blades cleaved apart the hard pan soil as if it were a dirty sea to be sailed through. “Up team!”

  “Up Beulah! Les’ go Jim!” The order came firm but fell soft on the pair. They knew the work ahead. Looked back at the brown-skinned man briefly to make sure it was the one they could trust. Leaned into the collars and took off.

  Every muscle rippled beneath bay and roan coats. The breath of the bay came heavy but even, hot through an open mouth with yellow horse teeth grimaced bare. His jack-assed ears taken from his mammoth Jack dad, lay back against the short-cropped main and thick neck as if to cut the tension hanging thick in the September air. The broad-shouldered roan, the younger Jenny, barely broke a sweat. Her ears shorter by a finger the product of her Percheron mama. She stood a hand or two above the male but knew already how to measure her longer gait to make the twosome one. Head down and eyes straight ahead, her nostrils flared as heart’s engine stroked the piston deep within. She and him. Beulah Mae and Jim. They leaned into the work with equal strain
. The leather collar creaked as if it would break but never gave way. With hooves gaining purchase—with barely another word from the old Black man holding the reins. They knew well the terrain and went at the job with nothing but oats, wheat straw, and rest as pay when the lower field was done.

  The ground roiled up as they steady went on. Old forged steel sliced into Cecil loam as knife whetstone honed might cut into hot fresh bread. Laid it open so you could see clay deep down coming up red. Yard by yard the team plodded on. Gee’d ’n hawed at the row’s end. It seemed they knew the ground better than the old boganned farmer. His forty-three acres sat large. Fields rich with creek flood alluvium. The dirt before the blade become friable soil behind it. Ready to receive seed and rain for the next refrain of winter wheat to sprout up and throw heads when all else green was dead. The roan brayed. The bay followed suit. A barred owl let loose a call from the swamp as the evening dimmed to dusk and fell. Each step closer to the acreage being fully tilled the pair seemed stronger in the harness. “Step up now!” the driver said, harness laid over his own shoulders so he could feel the rest of the way home. They knew the old barn was that much nearer. They leaned in harder still.

  Even mules need down time. Beasts of burden are not soulless bags of flesh and bone but feeling beings in need of caring. The plowman knew this. The land they all worked grew crops well but held the legacy of too much bitter before it ever bloomed sweet. He owned now what bondaged ancestors could not. The mules were a promise made to times past. A promise kept to those never met. The team sweat lathered and tired. Deserved watering. Earned dinner. Needed rest. An extra measure of grain was in order. A bath would wash the sweat away with warm soapy water, curry out the matted hair to ease the strain, then rub the liniment on to ease fatigue. On the way in he’d slip Jim a ripe apple from the orchard. Give Beulah Mae the carrot from his pocket that he’d rooted up from the garden.

  The day closed in on night as the last rows opened up. I heard the leather creaking, the rigging buckles ringing. Equine exhaustion smells heavy sweetly musty of horsepower made step by step. I watched from the road, until I could not see, imagining myself in the furrow pulling the plow with no help. The owl called again to remind me of the time.