The Garden of Wings: Episode of a Sparrow

  

          I carry the bag of sunflower seeds by hand out to the feeder. A warm day, even by my soft standards. The first time I've felt that, said that, since I don't know when.

         Approach the raspberry thicket, leafless all winter, to pass between the branches the ten feet or so to the feeder. I stop as the flutter of nearby wings scatters the local brunch crowd, the rhythm of small, brownish birds darting to the feeder, then darting back to the safety of densely branched, overgrown shrubs.

            But one of them heads the wrong way, landing on a bare raspberry cane a few feet away from me. One of the sparrows.

            Brown, as ordinary as a bird can be. Yet at this distance fascinating. I stand perfectly still.

            Then my eccentric bird hops-flies -- not away, but toward me -- to land on a bare horizontal-tending branch directly in front of my stomach, inches away from my body. Nearly touching me.

            I imagine myself a scarecrow.

            I am not a living creature to this bird. I cannot be, or he would fly away as his ancestors learned to do millennia ago, if they wished to go on being birds.

            Instead I am, perhaps, a shadow. A large, blank stillness, blocking his view in one direction.  

            The bird adjusts its spatial orientation a little to one side, and then to another. It turns its constantly-scanning head to one side, and then to the other. As birds do. Watching for the signs. Watching to see how the others are moving. Or not. Or have hidden somewhere out of sight.  

            The way all small birds seem to do, continually looking out.

            Where are the others? Where are the signals that would clue its next move.

            But though my bird moves his head continually, and I can see his greenish eye searching the world, he does not see me. He sees perhaps a wall. A grayish shadow.

            Perched on the horizontal branch, his tail feathers, angling one way and then the other, are about two inches from my fuzzy-clad stomach.

            I am tempted to extend a finger and touch those feathers. But I do not wish to frighten my wild visitor away. I watch its eyes as its head moves back and forth,

            I have never been this close to a bird in the wild. Its habitat, its world.

            Does this bird's vision have a blind spot? Not fatally, at least not yet, since it is alive. And in all other visible respects it appears to be identical to all the other sparrows who enjoy pecking at our feeder, and perching nearby, with great regularity.

            This is a 'special' bird, perhaps. Running, flying, surviving with its cohort. Mainstreamed with the flock.

            All the other birds give me the conventional wide berth when I approach their whereabouts. They are not pigeons, or domestic fowl, who might gather around a human feeder dispersing the seed.  

            Still I am motionless. Still 'my' bird looks from side to side, but does not move away.

            I have never examined a bird at so minute a distance. I can see strands of brownish-color feather in wings that otherwise appear a single unified, feathered wing. Its color, for which I continue using the 'featureless' word 'brown,' reveals itself as a complex mass of variations in color. Intricate patterns. Lighter, darker, tan, black-brown; arrows, diamonds.

            Its perfect little head, the needle-sharp beak.

            And that unreadable eye that fails to see 'me.'

            I try to examine that eye for a flaw. Even at this range it's too small for a human eye to name its color, or parts. I sense something greenish, brighter than what I see at ordinary distances.

It's still looking 'around' me. For something behind, or through, me.

            I'm not 'there' to it yet. As a creature. Something that moves and is best kept away from.

            I am tempted again to lift a finger, slowly, and try to touch this bird. But it seems more respectful to wait and watch what it does.

            It sweeps its head, yet again, from side to side. But nothing is moving in its world.

            Eventually it flies, or jumps -- the distance is so short that 'flies' doesn't seem the right word -- the three or four feet of distance to land on one of the feeder perches.

            Unmoving, I watch as its beak jams into the seed-hole and pulls out seed after seed. And then -- chews? The beak somehow grinds down on the sunflower shell sufficiently to loosen it. I have never observed this act closely enough to see this detail. Little bits of shell go flying out of the beak. Somehow that narrow tiny instrument is breaking the shell from the seed and discarding the chaff.

            It keeps pecking and eating. Left alone, it pokes and grinds. Is it hungry? Do birds' gullets know when they've had enough?

            Finally I cannot go on spoiling the natural sequence of events. What ordinarily happens is a bird abandons its feeder perch because another arrives too near. But nobody is coming now because I, the threateningly large creature, am standing there.        

             I take a half-step toward the feeder. This movement apparently wakes 'my' bird to the presence of a large creature and it makes the swift and sudden leap and fly-away that I observe more often than I can count, day after day, all winter.

            My close encounter? A chance in a thousand?

The Birds of Winter: Companions in All Sorts of Weather, Are they Harbingers of Change as Well?

We've seen cardinals in Massachusetts for years. Pretty much everyone does. At one time cardinals were a bird found widely in the South, but not in the Northeast. Bird feeders -- like us -- is one of the reasons the species was able to spread north. But so is the changing weather pattern. The last week is a good example.

          As the first two photos on the left side suggest, cardinals (a female in the top picture), are extremely picturesque against New England snowfalls. But most winters snow comes and goes. Last Saturday night's snow was half melted by Sunday noon, and almost completely gone by Monday. Today's temperature topped off at a record-territory seventy. We used to call that an 'unseasonable' temperature -- but does that expression really make sense any more? As global warming makes our winters a little more welcoming for migrants from the south, it also causes more frequent and extreme fluctuations in weather conditions. 
            We see many egrets (top right) in Florida, where these wading birds are common. But we also see them in coastal New England, as in the photo here, enjoying a mild autumn afternoon in a salt marsh adjacent to Quincy's Wollaston Beach. Egrets often nest here in the summer; a few winter over along the estuarial waters of the Massachusetts shoreline.  
           The chickadee in the next photo down has been a big fan of the bird feeder this year. They're quick to the feeder, competing with sparrows and other bigger birds, and quick to get out of the way when the next seating arrives. The chickadee's cousin, the Carolina chickadee, is reportedly on its way north. 
           The perching bird with strong gray markings and a long tail (fifth photo down) is an occasional visitor. He stuck around recently long enough for us to try to identify him. Mockingbird is my best guess. Another relatively new Southern transplant, the mockingbird has sung in our summers fairly regularly, but if he's here this winter as well, that's a first. 
          The osprey (seen perching above the nest) is not, to my knowledge, a winter visitor. This photo is from the end of last summer. Still, people build nesting platforms in Quincy and other towns these days to attract breeding pairs, and for the last three years, an osprey pair has found this one. The greatest number of osprey I've seen was in the shoreline preserves of St. Augustine, Florida. 
            I remember being told that the best time to see hawks was during the seasonal migrations. But in recent years I've encountered red-tailed hawks in all seasons. Some winters, though not this one, the encounters occur in the trees above our bird feeder. On one occasion, the "big bird" was simply standing in the middle of our neighbor's grassy lawn, a good perspective on the traffic around our feeder -- or maybe he was just tired. This year we hadn't seen one all winter, until a couple of weeks ago when we found him perched above, but not very high above, a walking trail in a city park. He saw no need to move as we stared for a while, then walked past him on the path. I stopped to take photos from both sides (I think this one was his better).
           For really big birds, it's best to let them come to you. It's been a couple of years since the turkeys turned up on our street, but when they do it's always an occasion. Here they peck at a neighbor's lawn, looking for gleanings in the bare ground of a mild February week. 
            I won't call it 'unseasonable.' Half of Boston was wearing shorts today.  
        

Garden of Death: Slaughter of the Innocents, Cheered on by Corrupt Gun-Loving Rulers

My poem on a nation's complicity in the unchecked serial murders of its young. 

Slaughter of the Innocents, Cheered on by Corrupt Gun-Loving Rulers

Nation of shame

Monument of hate

Begetter of falsehoods

Despoiler of truth

Bringer of early death

Child-killer, Love-stealer, blood-spiller

Eater of death, Denier of life, Destroyer of hope

Extinguisher of the flame of life, Bringer of ash, Digger of graves

Consumer of all that is good and kind and healthy, Cup-bearer of tears

Cry, the once Beloved Idea, weep for the love that was, the honor, pride, and

truth of a world, a place, a country any just soul would fly to in time of need. Now all we

need is a shovel, a plot of bare earth, a tired muscle, a withered heart, to bury all that once we loved

The Garden of Verse: Wisdom in Gurus, Mothers, Vermont, and Flecks of Cappuccino Foam

             I found not only a lot of fine poems in the February edition of Verse-Virtual, but a lot of wisdom. Poems live in our thoughts not for what they say so much as how they say it. We may 'know' these truths, or realize we've been told them (or shown them) before, but now we feel them as well.

            In his poem "Mahayana in Vermont," Sydney Lea is telling us that 'nothing' happens in the course of a long hike taken "with three dogs through the rain." But we know what 'nothing' means after hearing about the grouse, and the deer flies, and the "late trillium," and the counted steps. We know that 'nothing' actually means 'everything,' and are not surprised, but in fact happily gratified when the poem sums this 'nothing' up as "a mystic sense of well-being/ in quietly chanted numbers."

       

            In Alan Walowitz's poem "String Theory," a guru morphs into a Jewish mother when he responds to a bill of complaints with the advice "Things could be worse." It's a pleasing conjunction, offering an insight into both roles. Our guru may not know everything; and our mothers (Jewish or otherwise) are likely to know something valuable about their children. This recognition leads to a slightly shocking, but worthily eye-opening embrace of peace from an unconventional perspective (which I won't completely spoil by quoting it here). Aging brings complaints, but it beats the alternatives.

            In Penelope Moffat's poem "My Cat is the Buddha," the pleasure lies in how the proposition is advanced.

Yea though I do call her Smoke
her name is God.
Though I murmur “silly child”
she is intellect made flesh.

Serious things can be said lightly, and the wonderfully ear-pleasing arcane vernacular of sacred texts is out there for us to play with, as this poem so pleasurably does.

            The fleshly intellect of the cat called "Smoke" is realized in warm fur, a "nubbly tongue," and the virtue of breathing her "honest breath" into a bedside water glass. Animals too can be a sacred text. What pleasure to read about this one.

            Playful and fun as well, Kate Sontag's poem “The Many Lives of Foam,” invents a new world of "karma," the February issue theme that got me noticing the wisdom of these poems. It turns out that foam gets around. It's "a fleck of cappuccino... a white mustache on my future lover’s upper lip," also the "lather on your father's face," and the bubbling creation of "soap & glycerin" that finds a kind of ultimate release in a "roving rainbow." And a lot of other stages in between. Sometimes in the karmic journey of rebirths, everything  is relative. Sometimes the thing to do is just look at it from a different angle.

            Judy Kronenfield's moving and impressive series of poems "Saving the Dead" suggests to me that we 'save' them best by remembering them. I'm particularly moved by a poem about the acute memory loss in parents or other aged relatives (that many of us have already experienced in family members), a condition described in the acutely titled "The Withering of Their State."

"...the scales fall
from their eyes, and they fall asleep
in each other's chairs, and thine
is mine, and now is then, and mildly,
with the most gracious of oh?s,
they allow themselves to be
removed..."

            The wisdom here consists of seeing things as they are, offering the compassion that we would wish shown to ourselves... and simply letting be.  

            Tom Montag's fine contribution to the February issue of five concentrated reflections includes a couple of unblinking looks at the persistence of darkness in all lives. A kind of insight and wisdom that perhaps flows from "the stranger/ angel in my nature," to quote from his poem "The Sadness of Happiness." As this poem says, "between kiss and climax/
there is always this darkness."

            The somewhat longer lyric "Walking the Tracks on a Warm December Day" suggests a particulary Decemberish insight consistent with the time of year when the light is at its briefest, the dark its longest. The poem asks, "Train in the distance, or not?" But the poem knows the train is always out there, and will someday arrive.

            These are a few of the poems that spoke me in the February Verse-Virtual. Many other fine poems can found at
http://www.verse-virtual.com/poems-and-articles.html

 

The Garden of Stories: Rikers Island Prison, Where White Boys Got 'Woke' to the Reality of Who Goes to Jail in America

My short story "Behind Bars," dating from a summer internship at Rikers Island, the famous and infamous New York City prison, is published on the internet short story journal, "Beneath the Rainbow (http://beneaththerainbow.com/behind-bars/).
             It's the summer I learned about who was 'behind bars' in America's large urban prisons. People of color. People from Latin America. People, some of them white, who grew up in certain densely populated inner city neighborhoods, with bad schools, too little family income, absent fathers, family histories including alcohol, domestic abuse, and possibly drugs. People who valued money because they didn't have enough of it. People who learned to get it in any ways I never thought of. Stealing, fencing, scamming, gambling, hustling, selling drugs. People who -- if and when -- they became drug users (heroin then; many choices these days) knew where to look for money: in their family members' hiding places, in the loose behavior of people (often white) who were less worried about keeping it, behind vulnerable locks on apartment windows and doors, unlocked or otherwise vulnerable vehicles, in the stores, workplaces, and warehouses where there was something lying around to steal. 
            Behind bars at Rikers, on a couple of occasions or twice, I tried to do something out of the routine to help people. One inmate was an admitted fence, but not a drug addict. His little brother, however, was a 'junkie' and was certain to break in and rob his apartment if he learned that he was in jail. To protect his home he needed to make a phone call; would I help him? I did.
          On another occasion an inmate who ran an illegal high-stakes poker game, he admitted it, told me that he had been committed to prison without having appeared before the judge. No day in court? He told his guards about this omission, but no one would believe him. He knew he would end up jail for a few months after appearing before a judge, but it was the principle of the thing. He believed in the American 'justice system.' 
           I persuaded the prison authorities to look into it. The guy was right.
           Here's how my story "Behind Bars" begins:

White summer interns in sports jackets and slacks, we’re assigned to assist the social services department in the Reception Center of the Rikers Island prison complex, run by the New York City Department of Correction. A set of the three big units (men, women, youth), the prison was built on an island in New York City like a harbor fortification, but Francis Scott Key never visited Rikers Island. It is one of the largest prison complexes in the world.
Undergraduates, newbies in the way of the world, we’re assigned to our little cement box of cell-like offices, each with his own desk, chair and yellow pad. Our work begins when a new shipment of convicts is dispatched to the island after their day — or, more likely, minute — in court. They arrive in big daily batches, like harvested crops or factory deliveries. Dominic, a neat, black-haired young man of Cuban descent a year my senior, and I sit in our office cells conducting formalized “reception interviews” for each new inmate, inking down their responses to a long series of intrusively personal questions on a four-page form.
Who are these men? Why are untrained summer interns, college kids, mere players in the fields of academe, entrusted to carry out these interrogations, however rote and bureaucratic? Who are we to ask such questions of men twice our age, sometimes older? 

Here's a brief excerpt about my college kid naivety: 

Though I myself was born in the Borough of Queens, [the inmates] speak of neighborhoods, or spawning grounds, by names I am unfamiliar with.
“They call it Hell’s Kitchen,” one fair-haired young man informs me.
“But you’re white,” I blurt, ignorantly.
He laughs. “They’re all Irish,” he tells me. “The kids I grew up with? They’re all in jail.”

          To read the whole (not very long) story, see:
http://beneaththerainbow.com/behind-bars/ 

The Garden of Verse: When You Get What You Deserve, Now or Later, It's 'Karma'

 Karma, the belief that our actions in this life, plus some steerage from whatever is hanging around from previous existence, determines our condition in our next life, is a word a lot of us use in informal ways. It's the theme of this month's Verse-Virtual.com, in homage to the recently deceased poet Dick Allen, who explored Buddhist ideas in some of his later work... And it's an idea that can go in a lot of directions. 

         In the classical Hindu theory of reincarnation, the sum of your moral conduct will determine the state of your next incarnation. Will you be reborn as a higher-status individual, or a lower one? Or as an animal? Or possibly even an insect? So don't step on that ant; he may come back as your boss. 

         In the American vernacular "karma" tends to be used loosely to suggest a cosmic connection of any sort between past events and present ones. Did the IRS send you an unexpectedly large refund just when you needed it, after you spent a lot of time last year volunteering at a nursing home? It's karma. On the other hand, if you've been nasty to someone at work, then someone is mean to you later that day, or the next day, or the next week. And a part of you feels, 'well, maybe I deserved that.'

            In response to Verse-Virtual's theme for the February issue, I contributed three poems on ways of thinking about karma.
            The poem "International Karma" connects the violence two communities inflicted upon one another in the past as warring allies of World War II enemies England and Japan to the assaults the Buddhist Burmese majority are currently inflicting on the ethnic minority Rohingya, who are Muslims. Here's the poem:

 
International Karma
 

The Rohingya may know little of karma
They follow a prophet whose law was furthered
by rounds of daily prayer
offered fresh from the oven of the soul
 
And though their persecutors are, formally, Buddhists
whose varied traditions of thought include the notion
that what you do here and now
affects who, or even what, you become then and there
and even in the undreamt future,
traditions of thought and belief
lose sway to the smarting remembrance of grievances
 
therefore doing onto others what the British and their allies
have done to you, and what you and the wartime Japanese,
have done to those whose mutilated communities
now flee, carrying their borders on their backs,
raising for those who look from afar the question:
Is karma but another word for history?
 
It may be, as the Vikings once believed,
that 'destiny is all'
But if karma bends to the wheel of fate,
it is the heft of human deed that pushes wheels along
and karma,
the fingerprint on the soul,
the DNA of conscience,
the golden template of deeds good and ill,
inscribes our souls in the book of eternal recurrence
 
... And so whatever dooms have befallen you,
courtesy of the British or the Japanese
it is hard of heart
to see how compunction requires the expulsion of a people
much like oneself
arms, legs, eyes that weeps, loins that
breed a miracle of life
from particular pieces of planet Earth,
where ways of life, or worship, or contemplation
are various in dress, but rooted all in home,
familiar food, happy smells, a well of communal expectations
entreating safe return for
love's meager, wounded, breakable body
 

 

 

           To read my other poems, "​Karma Falls From the Sky," and "Christmas Karma," go to http://www.verse-virtual.com/robert-knox-2018-february.html

            Plenty of poems by many fine poets on a wide variety of subjects in the February 2018 issue can be found at: http://www.verse-virtual.com/poems-and-articles.html