This morning in the Mendocino mountains
I rekindled an old conversation,
picked up just where we left it,
thirty odd years ago –
me and some chatty Wisconsin birds.
They were ready to tell me something
(a secret actually,) though
maybe they mistook me
for someone else,
a young ornithologist perhaps,
and I abruptly cut them off –
mid-sentence in fact.
I was young and hurried,
birds had nothing for me –
a lot of useless noise –
so then I walked away
and then I forgot.
Now we’re back together,
a monastery in the mountains
two thousand miles west of
the Wisconsin North Woods.
I doubt it’s the same birds,
though they know it’s the same me,
they haven’t forgotten,
and so we commence our conversation.
At first their words are gibberish,
like Emily Dickenson on first reading;
is there a point to all the squawking?
Then that magic key is turned.
My 9th grade teacher’s wife, Mrs. Wetzel,
she told me about that key:
“With Dickenson, there’s a key,” she said.
And so, it is with birds in the woods.
And it is a secret, a real secret
written in the code of bird song.
The birds recite the words –
the same scripture transcribed
from leaves and branches,
all across the forested world;
translated into the language of
crickets and lizards and even
known to domestic animals,
yea even dogs and cats,
who are too polite to tell
though you can see it in their eyes,
in that watery glass reflection
like a stained-glass window.
A bird squawks from a tree,
a second squeals from another,
and I think aloud, “a church choir”
as I sit in rapt communion below.
Birds talk about many things,
sometimes they talk about us.
There’s been a long, lonely
wait for our awakening,
in fact all animals await us,
some are more patient than others,
some will bite and chew and eat us
much like human predators who
prey on the weak and less cunning
though with animals the
right is more deserved –
a natural response to our
fear and our treason.
But the birds, they just wait,
they wait in talkative serenity.
At daybreak, they are joyous
of the new coming sunrise,
and they talk about the coming day
though it may be no different than
any other day, it is the joy
and serenity that is worth
the speaking.
They warn of, yet cherish,
each coming rainstorm and the
wisping winds or voracious gusts
that force them into trees to
sit patiently and simply watch
in perched awe.
The birds of the forest
are our passage out.
They are not trained in begging like the
pigeons who followed us into the city,
who cluck sidewalk to sidewalk
looking for human scraps.
Instead, they are the ones who have
clung to the woods and to the seas
who speak to those who would
come to listen as they relate the vast
mystery of creation.
