Poem: Ode to a Turkey Vulture

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Ode to a Turkey Vulture

“The other world is to be found, as usual,
inside this one.” ~ Susan Sontag

O companion of my heart,
I am kneeling at the long
window, hushed with you,
statuesque
gargoyle grotesque
on the cathedral barn.

In this, the attentiveness
of longing, you wait
in your placid eye,
onyx bead embedded
in the corrugated heart
of your featherless head.
You hunger, like me, taciturn
in a violent world. You lift

off into the blue
without sound, to travel
like John in the wilderness.
O calm and golden remiges,
soft oars stippled with sun,
my love, my inspiration,
my ferryman to the flowing sky,

your peaceful floating
a surrender to what rises,
the kitely sails of your wings
tilting, lilting on tides of heat
that carry fragrance
of decay. In this air,
what is death is your joy.

All the suffering in these little
ones who bring you sustenance
you did not wield with talon
or tooth. The pink and gray
fleshes gurgle over the gullet
stones of your hearted throat, all
their silenced cries,
their chests opened, every
disappointed beat and falling
enveloped in your beak,
lifted up, a mercy
in this fractured air.

And long
in the shadow of the tree
you clean yourself. Through you
all is purified. Tonight the moon shines cool
in a black No Man's Land, and we sleep.

Listen to a podcast of this poem here.

Notes:

gargoyle - originally gargouille in French means throat or gullet;
the downspout for rain at the outer edges of roofs of churches
and other buildings; grotesques were gargoyles of fantastical
creatures that were not waterspouts but were meant to scare off
harmful spirits

remiges (pronounced ree-meks) - the flight feather of a bird’s wing,
its origin from the Latin for oarsman

Read my prose poem about a turkey vulture in a previous post here.

The Turkey Vulture's cousin - King Vulture porcelain

 

This King Vulture porcelain is in the collection at the Art Institute of Chicago. This is the AIC's booklet writeup about the piece: Around 1728 Augustus II, the Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, conceived of replicating the animal and bird kingdoms in porcelain. By 1733 more than 30 different models of birds and almost 40 animals had been made, many by the sculptor Johann Joachim Kändler. Kändler modeled this King Vulture from life, which allowed him to animate the creature’s quintessential spirit. Such porcelain animals remain the most vivid expression of Augustus’s wish to possess and rule over the natural world.

See scanned turkey vulture (and other bird) feathers like the ones below at The Feather Atlas of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. 

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Sonnet: Praise for ordinary wonder

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Killdeer, by John James Audubon
from the book The Birds of America

“The passage into mystery always refreshes. If, when we work,
we can look once a day upon the face of mystery, then our labor satisfies."

—Lewis Hyde, The Gift, p. 25

Praise for ordinary wonder

The linen of a killdeer’s breast below

his throated rings flies suddenly before

the car and dips beneath a corn row.

Mundane the days can stretch, an endless floor

of samenesses, the tapering of leaves

of each and every fern, the ottoman

with piled familiar books, where villainies

and graces eternally have fallen.

But always I will honor the counting

of ten toes, digging into the blanket

in the burial of the day, not mourning

next day’s clone of this one with regret.

For in between the copies of each day’s

roads and words, a bird flies, and I'm amazed.

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Magpie poem: Birds

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I'm trying my first Magpie, Tess Kincaid's (of the grand Life at Willow Manor) writing prompt from her blog Magpie Tales. It's so nice to be part of a community of writers around here, isn't it? I just love you all. This is Magpie 65, and if you click on that, you will be able to link to lots of other writers' responses to this image of a lovely St. Francis statue offered by Tess.

Birds

Were they the center
of your being?

Their
bones impossibly light
like straw

blown from the barn floor
out the door

spiraling
a shadow on the air

with no darkness
at all

like this stir stick
and cream
swirling

infinite questions
that dissolve
in the well
of my morning coffee

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Six wild mallard eggs for Easter

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Aren't they beautiful?

The mother found this teepee shelter in the black locust wood near the old fallen apple tree to build her nest. She will lay one egg a day until she decides her brood is enough — maybe 10, or as many as 18 eggs. Then she will set her warm body on them for about a month. The ducklings will all hatch the same day, whichever ones survive the coyotes, foxes, hawks and crows. The drake will hang around for a few days, lounging and dabbling in the nearby pond, which is about 200 feet away. He will moult all his beautifully colored feathers and be flightless for about a month, in the eclipse plumage phase. The hen will show her brood the way to the pond, where they will know by instinct how to catch insects to eat. Then she will go moult her feathers and be flightless for a while too. In about 10 weeks after hatching, the ducklings will have feathers that look like their mom's.

We are starting to search for morel mushrooms in this wood, and the woods by the pond. Gotta look out for sprouting poison ivy though.

Here are a female and male mallard from the river on my campus.

Happy Easter!

Poem: The Great Gray Owl

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It was disappointing Sunday when I was sitting outside in the summery breeze, writing on the laptop, and Don came rushing up to call me back to the pines where he had seen a great gray owl. I went with him, also rushing, then creeping quietly when we got to the pines. We searched high and low in stealth, but he was gone. I have never seen an owl outside a zoo, though I have heard them at the farm. Don looked into eyes just like these. We did find three pellets on the ground, things that Don's third grade students dissected in his classroom last year, and that was thrilling. (Owl pellets are regurgitated; they're not poo. You can read about owl digestion here, it's fascinating.) As the experience worked in my consciousness, other things floated up and into a poem.

The Great Gray Owl

When I was a girl, at night
I stood in the shower
like a shivering field mouse
afraid of yellow eyes
behind the curtain, the man who wasn’t
there
          the man
not from the street, or the window,
but from the shadowed attic,
or the basement, clammy and dark,
the invisible one who came behind
my skittering heels
while I carried a can of beans upstairs. If only
I had the swiveling head of an owl to always
see the predator,
though what good would a swiveling head do
if he is invisible?

There was a great gray owl in the pines
on a summery day in April
when the wind pushed the bamboo
like dainty bending ballerinas in a row,
first this way, their thin arms up, swaying,
then the other way, leaning at the waist.
My husband came running to me, to pull me back
to the woods to see those black and yellow eyes,
staring as my grandfather’s
had from a sepia portrait
at the top of the stairs
when, the youngest, I had to go to bed
before everyone.
          A man
I did not know, a figment, a phantom.
Handsome, dignified, staring, terrifying.
How could I know — That he,
if he had really been there,
not just gray eyes in yellow skin, flat
man on a flat wall, if he had been full and flesh
as he was at last one year visiting from New Jersey,
that he would torment me on his aging,
bouncing wool gabardine knees with foolish mischief,
teasing until I would gasp
between a giggle and a sob. O too soon
when we buried him he was skin and bones, leaving me
to wonder if ever, ever
I would know for certain that a man was really there,
and whether he was benevolent, or cruel.

The owl was not there.
He had flown. On the ground we found
three owl pellets — hair-covered remains of mice, rabbits, moles —
cocooned bits of skull, white ribs, vertabraic knuckles, teeth.
No eyes. Nothing
but gray shrouds of fur.
What the owl could eat, he ate, then gratefully,
even compassionately it seemed,
delivered them up — whole, like small torsos
without need for arms or feet, beautifully
and purposefully wrapped, woven in wool, napped
and cowlicked, tweedy, suited for the earth,
elegantly prepared for burial.

one of the owl pellets we found; owls regurgitate them, they're not poo;
for more on owl digestion (fascinating), read here

Great Gray Owl photo found here.

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Mind walks

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The Norwegian Jøtul wood stove in the family room (where we spend most of our home awake time -- where I write, read, work on photographs, blog, paint and watch movies) radiates heat into much of the house, and the forced air propane furnace rarely kicks on. We feed the wood stove dead, seasoned wood from the fallen trees that stripe the back acre of the farm. Ash borers have defeated many tall, straight ash trees, and thanks to that tiny, mighty pest, we have some of the densest, longest burning firewood there is, for a long time to come.

On Saturdays, just after sunrise, while snow falls and floats like ash outside the glass deck door, and chickadees, juncos, mourning doves, cardinals and blue jays rise and fall from the ground to the spruce and back again for scattered bird seed on the ground, I put our biggest pot on the radiant Jøtul. Into olive oil I drop chopped onions and celery that quickly begin to sizzle. Then what’s left of vegetables in the fridge, rough chopped, and scraps I’ve saved in the freezer, get added and filled almost to the brim with water. (My gourmand ex-brother-in-law Larry scolded me once for not saving every dear peel, rind, stem and shaving from vegetables in a freezer bag for a Saturday broth-fest; within the scraps are contained the same elements of vegetable goodness. I changed my ways.) For a few hours I cook this potful that’s almost as big as the cast iron heat-box itself, creating tasty veggie stock that I’ll use in cooking for the next week. Cabbage becomes fragrant (!), and the low winter sun shines on the spruce where at least a dozen red cardinals are tucked in the branches, looking like soft, exotic fruits.

Like birds picking up seeds, I have been flitting from pillar to post gathering ideas and thoughts. I feel as if I'm back in college classes, pushing myself to do close readings of the writers I read. They join in the pot of my head like scraps from the fridge. But what soup is being cooked up there? I read passages from Rilke and Rumi at the daily blogs. Synchronously they link arms and walk like twins separated only by centuries. See the parallel lines from the readings posted a couple of days ago:

Rumi: I would love to kiss you.
The price of kissing is your life.  (~ from "The Price of Kissing")

Rilke: I would perish in the power of his being.
For beauty is but the beginning of terror. (~ from "If I Cried Out")

Each day friends come into the comment boxes and reflect on the passages posted in those blog salons, filtering them through their own separate experiences and patterns of thought. Paths emerge, merge, and sometimes lead into dense thickets where I have to focus hard, keep up and try not to get lost. I love mind walks, even when I'm in danger of losing my way. (Have you seen the wonderful 1990 film "Mind Walk" with Liv Ullman, Sam Waterston and John Heard? Nothing but stimulating conversation, while walking around Mont-St Michel . . . ahhhh.) I collect thoughts and words that smell good, and throw them into my pot-head ☺. Does this make me wishy-washy? Maybe. Like water, shaped by the vessel it's in. And what's inside the pot? Fragments of this and that . . . these, and all.
                                                                       
                                                                                       .
                                                                               . .
                                                                              . . .
                                                                            . . . .
                                                                          . . .
                                                                         . . .
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                                                                             . . .
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                                                                                  . . . . .
                                                                                    . . . . .
                                                                                     . . . . .
                                                                                  . . . . .
Steam rises from the pot, walking a ribboning path . . . . .

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Bluebird

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Because of some beautiful experiences with bluebirds (especially this one I posted about), I have paid close attention to them. Being blue, they also represent the throat chakra, the energy devoted to communication. Their quiet nature and melodic song resonate with my own inner call. I found the card in the photo above at the bookstore yesterday on my outing with Inge and knew I just had to have it. It's a Mountain Bluebird. The second photo, below, is an Eastern Bluebird. The third is a porcelain my sister Nancy gave me; he sits on my dressing table near a candle I light every morning. Do you feel a strong affinity for a certain animal? Here's a little poem about mine, with some first words of Rilke's.

Bluebird

What I lay claim to

is like anything

unpossessed

by anyone

yet on I go holding

the ache of blue

he empties in scalloping arcs around

the stubbled meadow

blue eye

in the eyelids of branches

witnessed

just a few times a year

cheer of song

the animal voice

I decided was mine one weightless day --

-- my spirit guide --

telling the truth

through the branched world

of my throated heart

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Listen to a podcast of this poem here.

By the way, I just viewed my blog in Internet Explore on my husband's computer (I don't have IE on my Macbook), and the formatting is in disarray. I wonder if this always happens in my posts. It must be annoying to view, if so. So sorry. I always post and view in Firefox or Safari.

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Turkey Vulture

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My leather clogs are soaked with dew and yesterday's rainfall through to my socks, and my backside is damp from the roughhewn rain-sodden bench, which is unsteady on the soft ground of the meadow. Low sun shines on my back and on the path’s thick wet grass that needs mowing. In October, the mower forgets his way through goldenrod that have lost their stars. White and yellow moths have flown away. Bees have no flowers to woo and have disappeared. The fire of sumac is flickering out, flame by flame. Yellow leaves on the tallest poplars around the pond applaud the parade of clouds marching past. Oh look! They have never done that step and roll before. Clap-clap-clap-clap-clap. Some in the meadow are falling asleep, unimpressed, while the chickadees keep fee-beeing and squeaking their high pitchpoints, and tree swallows treet their trits then swallow them in gurgles.

What have I come here for? Where is my place? A tippy bench at the center of things. So like a human. It takes long to quiet, shoulders hunched, hands warming under my thighs. Ah, just relax, kid. You think too much.

I don’t hear him coming, no treets, sqawks or screeches, but a shadow betrays him, like my brother’s thumb-hooked hand silhouette on the projector screen. I’ve seen them for days, since the neighbor bow-shot a deer and gutted him, leaving the entrails for wild animals in the field. I have seen them from the kitchen window, perched in the highest poplar branches like hunters in blinds, patient. But this morning, they are six-foot kites crisscrossing a gentle sky, scouting. Silent as arrows. He, my personal turkey vulture, could be scoping me, in my black crow hooded jacket, still as death. But I do not imagine this is so. Instead, I am certain that he is showing me how to scout, scope and scavenge. Why else does he arc over the pines and back under the sun, like a slow motion boomerang? Why tip and turn just there where the cloud parade ends, showing off the flourish of his wing-tip baton? What possible reason could he have for spreading his wing feathers like a sumac branch directly above me, floating down so close I swear I can feel him tap a message of longing on the wind’s drum? If he does not mean to demonstrate the silent way of seeking sustenance, why are we here?

You can listen to a podcast reading of this piece here.

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Chicken Scrapbook Memories

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Two years ago, in the spring, Don's cell phone rang at 4:00AM. It was the Post Office saying his chicks had arrived and to please come pick them up. They were peeping like they had something to crow about.

Since then he has bought more, and some he raised from eggs his chickens laid.

The Polish chicken varieties have spiky head feathers that resemble Samuel Beckett's hairdo. My Dutch sister-in-law Astrid named this one Kuifje (which I believe means this kind of top-heavy hair).

The two chicks below left are Polish, Honey is in the middle. You can already see their dominant bird brains, ha. You'll see more of Honey, below, when she's grown up.

Memorial Weekend 2008 was the first time Don let his first flock of chicks, the Ornamentals, out of the coop. Honey already needed a feather cut, because she couldn't see. So Lesley held her while Don played barber. Peter was Dr. Doolittle.

Don has also raised quail, ducks and turkeys. Last Thanksgiving he gave his organic, free range turkeys to many families around Michigan.

After more than two years of feeding and watering twice a day -- including in the deep freeze of Michigan winters -- cleaning coops, brooding, hatching, and gathering eggs, Don has decided to gradually thin the herd and be done with raising birds altogether. We don't eat eggs or chicken any more, and so raising them just to give away or sell is losing its appeal. Plus, we can't stay away more than one night, so we're feeling tied down. Don has raised some birds for meat to sell, but the first batch we got, the Ornamentals, we raised for farmy ambiance, and eggs. We named that first group, like members of the family. We would never, ever eat them.

Bob the Crèvecœur raped and pillaged. Squanto and Khan bit the hand that fed them. They, um, got the axe.

Our girls who were named have all been sold in the last few weeks to nearby farmers, except Jolie, who got sick and died this past spring.

At full coop Don had 116 birds. Now, all that are left are 8 turkeys, 7 quail, 7 chickens and 2 ducks. All the birds we named are gone. He wants to sell the rest, and by Thanksgiving in November, when these turkeys will be 30-40 pounds dressed out on a platter, he plans to be featherless.

When Don told me he was ready to be done with birds, I asked, What about Honey? What about Floozie?

He replied with a question, "Do you want to feed and water them?"

Pause.

Pout.

"No."

I was like a head with my chicken cut off.

I miss Honey, Floozie, Dahlia and Jolie running around the yard. (I don't think Bishop does.) But I did little or nothing to keep them alive, and as the saying goes, I shouldn't cackle if I haven't laid. Is it worth all Don's hard work, just for the pretty atmosphere they create on the farm? Do I want to venture out to the coop every morning and every evening, spring, summer, autumn and winter?

Don has promised Lesley that when she and Brian start a family, he will get chicks before they visit, so their kids can learn about animals, play with them, and gather eggs, as many kids have done here, like Kaeley, our niece.

Until that happy day when Lesley and Brian start their own nesting, ours will be empty.

Don has a blog called A View from the Green Barn, where he chronicled his chicken and other farm escapades. It's wonderful. He doesn't post much any more, but there is still a lot there worth reading.

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