Sparrow Envy

by J. Drew Lanham

  The yoke I bore was neither oiled leather nor long rein but being myself with all the expectations from everyone else. The hardest ground to plow was living fully without worry, not in the past gone on or future yet to come—but in the present hardpan now.

  SOUND THINKING

  the ocean gives

  and takes

  by time and tide

  creates

  and destroys with each surge—

  lapping away at the edge

  of what we know

  I’m picking at leftovers—

  scavenging

  sharing surf with sandpipers and turnstones

  plundering plovers

  treasuring things the abyss didn’t want

  the birds find morsels of mussel

  and invisible things buried in the sand

  I scan the broken bits of aliens

  sent asunder by storms

  constellations of fallen starfish

  moon snails and angel’s wings

  ripped from reef and wrack

  empty houses, the deep dispossessed

  lie sea-strewn along the St. Helena strand

  a hermit repossesses the foreclosure

  scuttles away with the deal

  tucks away in security dealt by death

  sure in the uncertainty each wave, washes to and fro

  sheltered

  by some confidence that I don’t possess

  I saunter along the daily disaster dealt by the deep

  hoarding truth into pockets

  holding shards of sunlight

  in a memory already full

  thinking too much about what is

  maybe wanting what isn’t

  lacking a hiding hole

  or a shell strong enough to see me through

  I exist exposed on some intertidal plain

  live naked

  in between high water wishes and low tide wants

  unbalanced on the shifting of should and should not

  a gull hangs in the wind

  and laughs at my indecision to just be

  ON FINDING SWAMP RELIGION

  There is forever here.

  Some tree falling down

  giving itself up to gravity.

  Most do not surrender voluntarily, though.

  Entropy comes as the grim reaper to woods.

  As wind or flood or hungry bug,

  makes dying the only choice,

  the trees reclaim rightful place as moss

  as mushroom

  as litter mold.

  Some hang on by tip up mound

  a few roots still gripping earth,

  the remainder with arms raised heaven high.

  Can their rapture be far behind?

  Still giving life.

  Woodpeckers honor them with much pecking

  genuflection and holes.

  The Gospel According to Decay.

  Everything is wet or dead—or will be soon.

  I had a universe to myself.

  Alone. No one else in my own image.

  Thank you rain. And thank you for late sleepers;

  and for others’ responsibilities to their four-wall gods.

  They have theirs.

  I have mine.

  My gospel this morning:

  Nothing is as it was,

  Or will ever be

  Again.

  Others come to worship.

  Peace be done.

  Amen.

  CHIRICAHUA DREAMING

  Across rock-strewn folds, along rifts

  sand drifts to mountains

  sifts away in sudden rains

  red stones burnish to bruised purple hues

  from eagle’s eyes

  a wandering across a cloud-strewn horizon

  points the way

  to nowhere

  out there

  and inside—

  where the wild hearts beat

  a canyon wren calls

  tinkles like cool spring water down

  my spine

  the world’s weight

  drop it

  when forever flies over on a black hawk’s shadow

  COMPASSING

  Limitless is a faraway place

  way beyond the hogback ridge named possibility

  it’s over there

  through a tangle-thick forest the old ones call maybe

  it is a fortnight’s trudge through what could be

  and at least as far as a strong man can chunk a stone

  —straight as the crow flies

  a hard tough row across the mind’s breadth

  a frog’s hair from probable and head high from unreachable

  you can’t get there from here;

  but you can get here from there

  it’s in the next holler

  unfurl the map

  aim the compass well

  cause true north does lie

  dead reckon instead on reality

  find yourself there

  BUFFALO TRACE

  I watched an ant

  trek across the landscape

  of a bison skull,

  antennae wavering

  in wonder at the expanse

  of great plainness.

  It seemed a dry hard place to be,

  a desert of dead bone with fissured canyons;

  channels.

  Dark chasms emptied of cow eyes

  that once rolled wild, but void now,

  plunging down into an empty cavern

  where a bovine brain sat once,

  remembering (perhaps)

  ancestors uncountable on two-toed feet.

  The intrepid hymenopteran traced

  the narrow rims of those sockets,

  scaled the peak of horn as if it were ant Everest.

  Could it be that six legs

  makes the wandering any easier?

  Do its ant ears catch the echoes of herds past?

  Can it sense the thundering rumble

  under each little foot? The tumbling of a

  band over a cliff to its death?

  In and out. Up and down.

  The tiny traveler made its way across

  the abysmal plain to parts unknown,

  packing nothing more than what ants carry

  on such expeditions. No cut leaves

  or sugar grains on board,

  now seemed a heavy enough load

  for its half dozen limbs—

  or my four.

  SOULFUL WARMING

  cold creeps in

  a gray chill settles

  darkness fills

  where sunlight fails

  cardinal chants

  in tangled bramble

  towhee kick-scatters leaves

  and care

  take heart

  grasp hope

  feathers lighten

  solstice’s darkening burden

  brightening briefest day

  FIELD MARK 73: HOW TO JUST BE

  Real world means inside obligations to tend to. Widget making. Deadlines pressing. Bills always due. More and more four walls feels like a trap—a cage with no escape. Not being out; not wandering somewhere wild—seems sinful. There’s something wonderful I’m not witnessing. Some bird or beast flies or creeps by as I stare into someone else’s expectational chasm. It’s an expanse I’m increasingly unwilling to span. A new sun warms in brilliant hues. The same tiring orb sinks into the abysmal blue. When that coming and going cycles absent my firsthand witness, I’m squandering time. If wildness is a wish then I’m rubbing the lamp hard for a million more wandering moments.

  COVEY OF ONE

  Today,

  searching for the hidden thing but not sure what.

  Questing for hopeful

  in open fields among fence lines and under forever horizons.

  Birds sing

  waiting for responses.

  A single quail calls and waits for whistled answer

  but no
ne comes.

  He is a sad and wishful covey of one

  having placed faith in what might never be.

  Sparrows throw thin songs into tussocks of rank green grass

  and in their wistful pleas I find a bit of what’s lost.

  I am the tangled fence line gone to weeds in benign neglect.

  I am more rusted barbed-wire than gleam and gloss

  twisted loose and sagging each day more than taut-straight.

  I’d rather bouquets of hawkweed, toadflax, and henbit

  than vase-tamed rose any day.

  That a meadowlark knows by heart the time

  in passing clouds or brightness of sky,

  perhaps tosses sweet bubbling notes

  in some act of unknowable joy,

  teaches me that there is little sense in asking why.

  But rather,

  that simply perching still in some momentary shadow of now.

  I’ll sing a thin song too

  in my fallow and overgrown thicket where love skulks

  and hides within.

  GRAVITY (ALWAYS WINS)

  summer solstice soul searching

  wondering in the shadow of a swollen moon

  pondering time and tide

  highs and lows

  matching ebbs and flows

  I wander about in the perigee of my own orbit

  elliptically touching self-identity

  only to be pulled away

  by some unknown sun

  slung into the apogeal abyss of space and uncertainty

  I gaze skyward into the big orb’s glow as it torches trees

  in cold light

  and yet no fire burns

  save those I ignite

  I bask in the waxing

  bemoan the waning

  losing and gaining all the while staying the same

  wishing for myself

  my being

  my own heaven to claim

  NON-STATIONARY CYCLING

  Year by year we count age in candles and stages. But among the woods and the wetlands, among wild things, life’s count does not stop for celebration.

  Wandering in the winter woods yesterday, I sensed an urgency underneath the leaf litter. The damp mustiness hanging heavily in the decay ultimately means rebirth. Waiting seeds and warming soil are a promise for another season waged against weather and chance.

  A doe’s skull found bare and shining ivory, on the white oak ridge meant end and continuance.

  I wonder if coyotes make wishes on such things? Did the voided canid skull I found in the fern-full creek bottom mean that the god of wild things had exacted some kind of karma and taken a song dog’s life for a deer’s? I let lie the evidence to become something else.

  Yes, there is something lying in wait in these winter woods—lying and waiting in root and stem and shoot—waiting for the sun to shine more purposefully, for the light to linger a little longer with each day’s passage. The wild ginger blooms modestly where no one can see. A wren sang somewhere in a shaft of sun that fractured the chill.

  In the depths of what we call the dormant season, frogs a-peeping in secret pools and maples a-blushing against a bare-boned forest are sign certain that life will out and impatiently so—again and again.

  BACK ROAD

  day failing sun

  burns evening blue

  to twilight purple hue

  then ignites pine-studded tree line

  to saffron suddenness

  each somber green needle candles into torch

  each dying ray scorches memory

  —deep

  night stalks back road boundaries

  time chases hope

  and the light leaves in murmurs

  sprinkled across stubble-strewn cornfield—

  where the last lark song

  lingers

  and then settles on the fading edges

  between seeing

  and believing

  FIELD MARK 5: HOW NOT TO WATCH BIRDS

  Going out this morning to sit in my pickup truck on the side of the road to watch birds. To escape for a few hours in other breathing beings’ lives. To envy who they are. To revel for just an hour or two in their songs. But then, I hesitate, wondering what’s happened overnight? What city burns? Who’s alive? Who’s dead? Can a blue grosbeak change human plight? Can an eastern meadowlark’s territorial claim to sunrise, orange sky, or the right to breathe without death in the offing, become for a moment my own dream? Just thinking there might be some way to be where I am in my Black skin and not wonder if I’m being trailed, tailed, watched, surveilled, sized up to be brought down? Still thinking on it—whether I should go to some wide open field with clouds and grass; sit among grasshopper sparrows balanced on thin wires concerned with nothing else but being themselves. Lucky birds. Troubled man.

  BOHICKET ROAD RAMBLE: FLASH FRY GENTRIFY

  Slidin’ down Bohicket—

  skinny black snake ribbon of two lane

  all greased up n’ snot slick with spittin’ drizzle

  tryin’ hard not to be one of the dead the live oaks claim

  don’t wanna give my name to one of those roadside graves

  epitaph scribbled skid-mark quick in asphalt

  when the swerve came on too quick

  a straight stretch can fool you when it suddenly ain’t

  an unseen curve bent on killin’

  memories lie deep in the oak wood’s tight-packed grain

  three-hundred-year-old souls don’t budge for Mercedes

  not even an S-Class or a Bimmer Z

  those trees

  —damn things—

  gnarled and stubborn like crotchety old men—

  given only to respecting the odd hurricane or two.

  those old Bohicket souls

  —beenyas—

  done watched wildness come and go

  seen skeeter-fested swamp change from Black hands to white

  Gullah slave land to swamp worth not a red cent

  That mucky hell came up for cheap sale

  carpetbaggers moved down

  made miserable marsh paradise

  hunted duck

  rode horses behind hounds chasing deer

  got busy killin’

  grew richer by the year

  worthless sells for millions

  dark folks that worked the land can’t even pay rent

  them ol’ Bohicket souls done seen it all

  but the finest German engineering don’t mean shit

  when you big around as a house

  steel and glass just turn to trash

  when high end Euro speed meets old growth oak intent

  Scraggly moss beards hang from every tree

  southern comfort is what they’d seem to be

  fluttering like flags in the sulphur funk of pluff mud

  layin’ on the breeze

  Ain’t much genteel about wood hard as concrete

  that white cross tacked on the side oughta be ample sign

  glimpses of haints roamin’ the pitch dark road on foggy nights

  say slow down a bit

  hug that yellow line

  but then—

  there’s always that one short on patience—

  silver Lexus sedan riding my pickup’s ample ass

  intent on pushing the legal limit

  pressing me to do the same

  Sixty-thousand-dollar cars ain’t gon’ wait

  there’s better living ahead

  The brunette chick in the rear view flew down I-95

  Michelin rubber on fire

  all Manhattean brown stone, tax-bracketed one percent

  smug as a motherfucker behind polarized privilege

  sped down here to leave the cold

  found herself delayed

  trailing my middle-class-dead-deer-hauling ride

  my South Cacka pace is way too slow

  high beams winka-wink for me to get the truck in high gea
r

  Seabrook and Kiawah are waitin’ at land’s end

  there’s a double gin and tonic somewhere near

  in the third home with the grass clipped just so

  and the whitetails that used to be harried

  walking about like dogs prancing for show

  ’cause behind the guarded gates

  camo and rifles ain’t likely to be found

  no—the residential meat is more properly procured

  organic-grass-fed-free-range-humanely-slaughtered cow

  bought bloodless

  kindly dead

  delivered by the pound—

  unblinking plastic wrapped and Jenn Air-grill bound

  wildness Bohicket’s end done been tamed

  owner associations’ dues assessed and paid

  wild must be approved-prescribed

  and the weeds only grow where the ordinances allow

  All’s not lost though

  there are still a few beasts to fear I’ve been told

  monster golf course gators

  beware that ten-footer on the ninth hole

  that mofo is almost as long as an Audi Quattro Drive

  If it’s in the pond then it’s clearly out of play

  between you and me we’ll let bigass sleeping crocodilians lie

  Beyond the McMansioned mentality

  on the other side of my small-minded rant

  across the brackish creek

  where the sweetgrass dances and sways

  the Atlantic’s surf is surging

  the tide is moving in

  somewhere

  there’s an old shallow drafted johnboat a-hangin’

  somebody’s ready to drop a chicken neck in the hole—

  hook a blue crab on the line

  float a cast net out

  bring dinner in

  maybe an ol’ boy will be wading in the muck

  shotgun in hand—Low Country at heart

  huntin’ for a mess of marsh hen

  to cook up freshly plucked

  with giblet gravy and sticky rice