Midwest Morning monostich

hawks

hung

in the air

-- Hamlin Garland, A Son of the Middle Border (1917)

Mystical Animal tableau

tame storks    who stalked

majestically

among the beasts

-- James Michener, Poland (1983), p. 108

Trouble in Paradise

Again the sun was hot upon the cacaos,

and the lorikeets were wild in protest

over some  imagined slight.

-- James Michener, Tales of the South Pacific (1946)

A bushful

many many

many many

many  tiny

b

               r

      i

                     d

s

[Spotted on my wife-walk  around “Stag-antler Lake”.]

Apparition

A

Bright red

Bright red

very very

Bright red

Cardinal.



[Note:  This vision appeared  as a result of the arrangements  chronicled  here:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2016/01/tinybird-is-careful.html ]

Tinybird is careful

pecking on the deck  at the seed we spread

over the else sustenance-hiding  snow,

Tinybird revels  in the unseasonal feast,

hopping like a miniature dinosaur.

At the glass door, I crouch and watch.

But Tinybird does not wish to be a meal for the gigantic man,

and instantly she spots me,

she flees to the trees.

‘Tis then that I rise,  with grand spreading gesture,

fling open the door,  appear,

and cast  another seed-spray  visibly into the air,

the while  making irenic smoochy-sounds.

Ah, bright herald  of a lighter, loftier world,

Tell me what thou heardest from Saint Francis!

Esse est percipi (poem)

The spot on the branch where the bird perched,

lo these several seconds, few minutes,  now an hour ago,

still bears the shimmering imprint

of that perfect bird.

.

Ornithomusia

(House-wren  coloratura)

Once of a sudden,  over my head,

a burst of birdsong.

¡ Such a big voice

 for such a tiny bird !

(Listening hidden  from amid

the leaves and twiglets of surrounding bush,

Miss Lady Wren cocks her head and thinks,

“He’s  the  1   4   Me !!” )

Ornithoscopy

b/(ird)s\((m))

ooo|ving#a(m)

(ong)VAst|/|\

br/a/n/ch/es . .

Ornithological epiphany

A red-red cardinal

with a green leaf in his beak

alighted on a ledge, almost within reach of me;

then cocked his head,

and flew off.

Augury

Birds,     stre eeea      K       ing

                                     across the sky .  .       .            .

Right to left, or left to right?

To the Romans,  that meant something.

But we (O tempora)  have lost the key.

To me, it means  one thing only:

God’s in his Heaven -- all’s right with the world !!!

Bird in a Window

Suddenlythere,     perky,

framed  by a pane,

a tiny sparrow --

                             gone!

Back-Deck Epiphanies

(1)   Tableau !

A bird perched, perfectly.

-- Perfect!  Do not try to describe it!

It is as it is  and as  ever it was:

A perfect bird.

(2)  Take that, e.e.c. !

what if a much of a which of a wind …

-- Yeh well:  what if a which of a much of a,   didn’t , hmmmm ???

Jevver think a that, mr smar-T-pants ?????

(3)  Quick Visit

(nodding, reading,  in the failing

light …)

-- At once,  from no Where,

a Sound   sudden   FILLS  all the air !

Unsuspecting, suspecting nothing,

a black-capped chickadee

alights

but three feet  from me.

and unleashes his fine full-throated call,

startlingly robust   for one so small …

yet then,  perceiving (with imaginable alarm)

an huge and uncouth, possibly ornithophagous

Something,

three feet away from he,

-- flies off.

At which I -- sighingly --

break into song,

tweeting t-tinily,  countertenórously ,

as best I might, from these unwieldy lungs,

“Return, O my sweetest -- Return !!”

Avian Clandestines

The birds are playing urgent birdgames in their leafy hideaways -- warbling full-throatedly in camouflage, then suddenly making a dash for it, streaking from tree to tree.  It’s as difficult to follow as a rugby scrum.

A tiny bird with a voice much too robust for his body  perches on an oak-branch and lets loose his call.  Its structure is fairly complex, with three movements like an old sonata, beginning as a sort of buzz and then a rattle, and at last a burst of chirps (his whole frail body vibrating the while, his little tail bobbing up and down).  At first this sounds inventive;  but then the thing is repeated, over and over, note for note, like a radioman signaling Normandy back in the war …

L’oiseau chante  avec ses doigts.   Une fois.

L’oiseau chante  avec ses doigts …  …

Only One Explanation

Down on the dock, a couple of laborers on their day off:
“fishing”, as the saying goes --

standing beside their propped-up rods,

and staring down into the water beyond their feet.

(This I beheld from the embankment.)

Then at once --

from off the rocks at the embankment’s base

(I myself having perhaps set it inadvertently  to flight)

a great grey heron spread its wings, immense in spread,

and took off, gliding   not too slow  and not too fast,

barely a foot above the surface of the water.

It whooshed past the standing men, not twenty yards out from them.

Neither budged, nor gave any indication that he had seen.

Tel the ploughman, when the flying boy’s white feet hit the sea,

beside the expensive delicate ship?

They ostensibly came down here to kill fish;

do they care so little for the splendid creature that legitimately feeds on them?

But no:  dim, maybe;  but none   so blind.

There is only one possible, logical explanation.

Each was adrift and asleep in the deep,

amid the cool of a fathomless pool of thought,

contemplating the RIEMANN HYPOTHESIS.

That has to be it.

~

[Postscript]  WWII reporter, re a sudden flock of Messerschmidts:

Peasants were at work in the lush fields … They did not look up to watch the roaring machines, but sat on their horse-drawn mowers   and watched the swath of grain they were cutting.

-- Wm Shirer, The Nightmare Years (1984), p. 572