Birds of America

Trill

I try to describe the sound of the killdeer,
how the sound bubbles up from the fields
in summer and bursts into wild cries,
kill-­deer, kill-­deer, kill-­deer,
so that if you walk out far enough,
there are trills and wildernesses on every side,
the prairie suddenly loud with the sound of living.
How a killdeer will chirrup as it lies flapping,
trying to make you believe that its wing is broken
so you will follow it away from a nest
that is set into pebbles on the hard ground.

How does a nest survive that way,
so helpless, exposed to every danger?

Yet it must. Every summer there are killdeer
running through the pastures, crying.
The killdeer is named for its cry,
a language that is made of its intention
to protect the dream of what comes next.
I can never describe this cry just the right way,
its exact importance, how lovely it is,
though I keep trying.

After all, was there ever any labor
that didn’t begin with some kind of hope?


Birds of America

Before the catalog, the art came.
The copper pulled itself, raw and greening,
from the gullet of the reluctant earth.
The engravers and colorists were sent by their mothers,
newly educated and freshly pressed.

The paper formed itself from disintegrating trees
that had grown in an area recently discovered
by someone who seemed important.

The watercolors and pastels
and pencils came forward and gave themselves up,
sighing in a drawer from inside a box
that was flecked and daubed with colored beeswax.
Tapping their fingers on the worn table.
Declaring themselves in stubs and smears
within a lined leather bag that was nicely patinaed.

Before the art, the wire came,
pulled from a spool and carefully arranged
to preserve the flurried feather and bone
that had no time left for a burial. The wire twisted
under neck and breast and wings,
cradling the soft bright body as lovingly
as that of a wife,

and posing it realistically, which is also called poise.
The pins, of course, kept everything in place,
whether feather or foot or braid or bun.

Before the wire, the body.
The body. Yes, that one. The one that
you’re thinking of now.

Before the body, a bird was there.
Bright and sweet and nervous,
like someone to whom you might say
Can you believe this weather?
Sweet and bright and nervous,
like someone buying groceries
on a weekend afternoon. Nervous
and sweet and bright, like a quiet child
hiding under a horseshoe table,
stacking vividly lettered blocks.

Before the body, too, the metal clink
of birdshot came, a roll and click
in the chamber of a rifle that had an oiled stock
made of a wedge of wood,
caressed into smoothness.
No rust on the rifle anywhere.

Before the rifle, a man named Audubon came,
who kissed his pretty wife goodbye before he left,

who knew he could be in an earthquake,
or break his leg, or get hanged, or fall overboard,
or get thrown by a horse, or get shot, or get sick,
or get sued before she saw him again.

Who knew what it was that his wife suspected.
Who taught himself that fame is fame is fame.

Before the man, a forest came
with trees that held their hands in worship
underground where no one saw.

And with the forest, singing came.

All different kinds of music, melodies, tones, languages, and sounds.

Some of the voices hadn’t even been discovered yet.
There was singing then, singing, constant and harmonious.


Conservation List

We don’t know all that we’re missing yet.

The broods of wild rabbits
fade without fanfare from the fields.

The spotted frogs vanish once,
which is enough.

It takes years to understand that an ivory-­billed bird
has abandoned us to our technologies.

But every extinction has to start somewhere.
The migrating songbirds starve,

their bodies found in city streets, in plowed fields,
no fat left on the breastbones.

So we set out a feeder.
We fill the feeder and wait for the birds,

which never arrive.
We keep it filled in case they do.

Trees split the dry earth with unanswerable questions:
What is it that you long for? Then, Are you still here?

Summer used to have an ending.
This is not the life that was meant for us.

As the aquifer runs dry, we ask each other
What will you miss the most?

Our mistakes, buried in plastic bottles,
will abide much longer than our mourning.

Hunger feels like the absence of love.
A gnawing in the stomach,

the surprise of less which weakens
the body, one pang at a time.

Why can’t I tell you the answer is you?
It is you I will miss the most.