Poetry is words on a page
nibbling at the edge of something vast.
--Bill
Kloefkorn, former Poet Laureate of Nebraska
It
was an April afternoon and I was dozing, lulled by the hum of the tires on the
asphalt on our drive home to rural Colorado from a Saturday of errands in the
big city. We had just topped 10,000-foot-high Kenosha Pass and dropped into the
tawny lake of windswept grasslands on the other side when my husband, Richard,
lifted a hand from the steering wheel to point at the prairie alongside the
highway: “Look!”
There,
standing on blue-gray legs were six shorebirds, probing the soil with
outrageously long beaks that drooped like surrealist darning needles. The
mottled brown and tan pattern of their backs blended perfectly with the light
and shadow pattern of the winter-bleached grasses.
“Long-billed
curlews!” I whipped my head around to watch them as we whizzed by.
I
hadn’t seen long-billed curlews in at least ten years, but I knew them
instantly. My mind took in the details of skinny-legged shorebirds with
proportionately small heads, bills equal to fully half their body length and
down-curved like elongated grizzly bear claws, plumage colored and patterned
like weathered grass, standing in the shortgrass prairie and poking about for
insects to eat, and it came up with long-billed curlew.
I
was drawing on what birdwatchers call “jizz,” the sum of a few distinctive
characteristics of appearance, behavior, and habitat that convey the birds’
essence, the flash of who-they-are, in less time than it takes to read this
sentence. That kind of lightning-fast recognition comes from experience, from
observing and paying attention in a way that makes the “other,” no matter their
species, known, no longer strange.
Poetry
has its own form of jizz, using just a few words and carefully chosen metaphors
to convey something essential of our understanding of other lives, our
connection to landscapes familiar or foreign, our place in the world.
A thin new moon struggles
over the brooding cliffs
and glitters, askew
in the brimming water. Shadows
lurk
in the cottonwoods. A night
creature
slides into the clearing,
moves toward the river, seems
to bend,
drink. It blends into sighing
night,
the haunted canyon,
its warm wind,
crescent moon, shadows,
deep-throated song of
water.
That’s
David Lee, portraying “Zion Narrows” in So
Quietly the Earth. And here’s another canyon in Primus St. John’s “If There
Were No Days, Where Would We Live” in his book Communion:
There is nothing more
beautiful
than coming out of a canyon
water all around you,
the temperature slapping your
face
like it was a baby’s ass,
otters & porcupines
hovering
like the opposite ends of
grace.
One
canyon is all shadows, “deep-throated song of water” and thin moonlight, a
place of mystery, fear, and magic. The other is all daylight and irreverent
joy, slapping you like a swat on the butt with images of sleek otters and spiny
porcupines. Each poem has a distinct jizz and thus a distinct and new
connection and understanding for each place. That’s the gift of poetry: enough
detail to root us in the specifics, like shadows that lurk in cottonwoods, not
just any anonymous tree, and the clear image of “otters & porcupines.”
Those specifics ground us in the landscape of the poem. And the metaphor in
each poem gives us wings as well, letting the poem fly loose into every life it
touches, and into our shared experience.
Seeing
those long-billed curlews the other afternoon, I was startled, not just from my
doze, but into a new understanding of the landscape where they stood. I knew
these big shorebirds in my childhood from the seas of grass and sagebrush that
make up the parts of the Great Plains and Great Basin where they nest in
summer, arid landscapes whose only “shores” are metaphoric ones. I hadn’t known
curlews from the thin air of mountain grasslands like the one we were driving
through, a miles-wide lake of windswept prairie at 10,000 feet.
The
sight of the curlews conjured up memories of a childhood trip to eastern
Colorado. The sun rising, huge and round and tinted pastel pink, over the
relentlessly level horizon of the western Great Plains as the sound of
long-billed curlews’ plaintive whistling calls, “cur-lew, cur-lew!” woke me in
my flannel sleeping bag. The earthy smell of damp soil under my cheek that
afternoon as I lay in the grass, immersed in a book, while my brother and
father searched for a curlew nest camouflaged in plain sight on the ground, and
the birds’ calls rose and fell in the hot, still air.
Poetry’s
evocation of the jizz of a particular place or life can startle us into a new
understanding, the way that quick glimpse of the long-billed curlews enriched
my image of the high-mountain grasslands my husband and I whizz through on our
regular trips to the big city. Now I know them as places curlews stop in
spring.
In
“The Dipper,” Mary Oliver evokes such a transcendent moment:
Once I saw
in a quick-falling,
white-veined stream,
among the leafed islands of
the wet rocks,
a small bird, and knew it
from the pages of a book; it
was
the dipper, and dipping he
was,
as well as, sometimes, on a
rock-peak, starting up
the clear, strong pipe of his
voice; at this,
there being no words to
transcribe, I had to
bend forward, as it were,
into his frame of mind,
catching
everything I could in the
tone,
cadence, sweetness, and
briskness
of his affirmative report.
Though not by words, it was
a more than satisfactory way
to the
bridge of understanding.
. . . Since that hour I have
lived
simply,
in the joy of the body as full
and clear
as falling water; the
pleasures of the mind
like a dark bird dipping in
and out, tasting and singing.
Long-billed
curlews were once abundant, their whistling songs echoing across prairie and
sagebrush in spring and summer. Now they are rare, their numbers devastated by
market hunting in earlier decades and their habitat destroyed by agriculture
and development.
I
haven’t seen more than two dozen long-billed curlews in my life, but on those
few occasions when I have spotted these big shorebirds, the sight of their
bleached-grass-colored bodies and down-curved bills bring me right home to the
shortgrass prairie and sagebrush plains. Curlews seem to me poets of the West’s
windswept interior spaces, their lives conveying the sense of the vast, treeless
landscapes populated by few humans but many other species. In that way,
long-billed curlews are as necessary as poetry, bringing us the jizz of what we
otherwise cannot know, yet must understand if we are to thrive in this world we
share with those so unlike us in every conceivable way, but so necessary to our
existence.
Life
itself is “something vast” - the myriad forms it takes, the grand cycle from
birth to death and then to birth again in some entirely new life, the puzzle of
our place in it. Life sometimes seems so vast and incomprehensible that we get
lost in ourselves. By conveying the jizz of life in word and metaphor the way
birds convey it in plumage and form, posture and place, poetry gifts us with
flashes of comprehension and connection essential to our understanding of who
we are and where we fit. It roots us in life, and gives us curlews’ wings to
fly on.