Well, here goes. You are not obliged to read the whole damn thing. A long poem on birds (and poets). Birds: a meditation. 1. The Wren in Autumn. The apple tree is twitchy with wrens, they fidget the yellow leaves. We are lucky these children of the dinosaur are scaled down to a smile, but in dreams I am pursued through golden avenues of oak, by blue wren raptors with eclipsing claws! 2. The Birth of Birds. In Time Lost, unseekable of the sun, all birds were born. The pillar of the world tree sucked the sea and dreamed, above the clouds its boughs from east to west outstretched their leaves, a-tremble at their own buds’ swelling to velvet husks, now flowers that burst out flaring colour unbearable, till fields of rainbows burnt up all the sky. Aghast, the world tree sank to ash releasing those flowers flapping, shrieking off and rising, gathering to diamond bands slow about the far forehead of the world. Time permanent, serious, unravels all her seams, eventually the apes stand up and wander. Birds, the dispersed language of that sky, quieten to obscure insistence of smoke crawling on their blue from people setting fires, burning new things, old things, new words: ‘fighting, dying’ – Above us, look! our teeth stare in the light amazed, the birds blot all our waking hours will dig our dreaming from beneath the sea, and black their birdwings on our brain. They fly in circles up and round on soaring maps you cannot read. Launching from our lives away, like wild children whose cradles carved with wings have foretold all their lives. In the sky their trails obliterate leave no shadow on our regret, to lure them back we remember ‘certain facts,’ but they refute imagination, and only fire can cast them down from heaven into the light of storms. ‘Birds are orthotaxic planetropes,’ intone the books, ‘their central axis on a point exquisite to their keel aligns to all points nowhere, compassed and willing nothing, black but white, night but light, indelible fruit of delicious queens..’ So much for books, I think the eye is cooler.. Consider this; fish eagle high up, an eye stamped on a monstrous hook rotates and drags the shape down with it to the lower planes, sternly marshalling the cornerless wind till beaten to feathered curves all flows to dark complex above the trees. Descent! The air parts bloodless for the wing on smoky water, Convergent to the fish’s side-on flash, then the claw in the dark wet, clamping a rip in the silver flank and heaving up its coins, with the gasping eye working blue air right and left. The Black Cockatoo, hefting his beak aloft, flying nutcracker to the stars! After monstering pine cones to chaff by the fifteenth green, now with his friends is stroking black signs on a red dusk. They row thoughtfully against time, and peal off cries that prism the ruby air, high aural flare as gloom dissolves the day. Crow, dark angel through the skies, night wing above the shivering plain, whose long asphalt vein, is pinched out by littered death, kangaroos in languid dinosaur poses, with roses for noses, Marble monuments their bowels, tented by the pluck of a beak like a stone pickaxe. Historians of the dead, fragments of song for the leaden jubilees! Exulting for home, crops full of rot, across Monaro plains into the hills, strong cradle of winter. You, with eagle flags circling in the skull, vomit chunks for the wheezing charcoal smudges in your nest. But each crow that starts up from the grave, goblin sign, he too departs, becomes an ark for feasting ants. His eyes, the nightshade beads that took the trickling map in far below, embraced stasis as his sign, now crinkle to raisins by the rushing road, ancient orphans scratched by insect feet. The knot brain that was anxious for silence and the last kicks, is not even half wise-guy now, not abuzz with diversions, flapping surmise, the bustling croak. And the final act (of which he would approve), is to be eaten by another crow. Yes, blue wren, twittering the air to sonic web, your IQ higher than crow, and certainly beyond the eagle – dumb war machine - friend of the dew, twitchy with bravado, I prefer you. But we cannot be birds. They burst right through our tribal sails we’re forced to drop the backdrops to our sky and face ‘facts’ clod by clod, even as the claws drag all our dreams away. Till at last we smile and fall into the air which boosts us laughing into our rhythm falling through, and brimming with song, popping lights and speaking dark (their tools to capture understanding) we wing to join them. But just as stars give up their country those subtle beaks have pierced our code, those dripping sings congealing in our mouths. ‘Not recognizable bird!’ they cry and flee to silence, leaving us to words alone, words, words coughed out and gathered up flowing words in pools and stones, do run from the flaming jaws of poets, poor hissing things, on all fours clenching and unclenching against the earth.
Posted on: Fri, 06 Sep 2013 06:48:21 +0000
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