#bird song
Forget all that you knew about warming.
A red cardinal turning grey of a glass heart.
All you didn’t know of dancing on the moon.
Zooming in on a tree and opening to it.
Red wood. Red bird.
Pine roasted, you were grilling over an open flame.
You were swimming above a blue lake.
You were asking a friend what color of green her day was.
Forget all that I didn’t know of the patterns of stems,
that calling names is just another way of claiming the weight
of you, which is to say when I learn
your first word — light — I unlove
and love you right then, just to feel
it full again – this bird song, this green
house, this lemon pith of warmth.
Our own floating city.
Forget what month we devoured with citrus,
that fog can fill us too.
That in sleep, our bodies are just white tissue
contained within flutes of streetlight.
Forget the rules of gravity.
Forget locking the door.
This home is my home and yours.
We wake to burnt blood oranges,
coffee humming, un-shelling ourselves —
the new sun resting her lungs
on a deck of a hill house.
The moon caked in lemon peels,
hollowed cavities where we creviced into sleep,
inlets where we danced fog-bent and silly, made rainfall,
showered below open pines, gathered moonshells, seas,
patterned our breath, tangling,
untangling and tangling again into the glass nest we call
this warming, you call
this shade of sage, this waxing
love year, this unfastening of name song.
Nick, I say, it’s always warm again.
Sorry about the shakiness. When I zoom too far it’s impossible to keep the image steady. This is an eastern meadowlark singing. I consider them among the most oddly-shaped, ungainly birds we have but I love their song, which sounds nostalgic to me, like they’re longing for something. I just love to see them.
Shadows on grass.
A sunny spring morning at the big pond on the 5th of May.
This morning along a country road.
Today is the first day this spring that I walked down to the woods and heard the wood thrushes singing again.
Loving our backyard.
Went outside and touched some grass today, fellow chronic onliners. Enjoy some calm suburban ambiance with me
Every year, when the cuckoo arrives and starts calling across the land, you realise that there has been a space waiting to be filled by his foolish two-note song. Most years, he arrives in the last week of April and, as the rhyme goes, ‘in May he sings all day’. This year, he didn’t turn up until the 8th of May, and then just called a few times and retreated into the hills, or moved on to some other place more to his liking.
So the Spring waits, incomplete.
