Ask anyone who keeps a winter feeder
full of seed, a blue jay does not sing.
Is in its manner rude. One of the roughs.
Could not feign sweetness if it tried.
Speaks out of a rusty well-pump voice
in need of oil, or any balm against neglect.
Says, "Not here. Not here," Where here
could mean anywhere, here or not:
the thing unheard in what we hear.

Aldo Leopold called the jay, the noumenon
of the forest. Aldo was a naturalist in love
with nature. We must forgive him, as we
forgive ourselves our own excess,
partnered as we are to a dissembling.

For a blue jay is not. Is really, nearly,black.
Is of a family Crow. Only by some trick
or turn of feather appears blue. At heart,
is not what it would seem. Unless seeming
is at the heart. Appears because of what lies
beyond, or behind it: a half truth, half on its way
to true. Like today's heaven of blue calling
the afternoon a cloudless sky. "Not here.
Not here," meaning: what ever is, God,
                  a blue jay tells us here.
 

The Rain Crow is a Mourning Dove

Rain crows, but no rain. Instead, the summer routine
under a round of blue skies, or, if rarely, clouds
cloudy with pretending.

Beneath it all, ribbed and over-arched with thinking
on the apparent, this morning, and every day
morning-like,

I listen to the recurrent sough that is the common tongue
of the conversant mourning dove. Rain crow,
to those countrified enough

to call them, the same bird by different names.
Depending on the weight of the weather,
and having but one

voice between them. The one heard for the simple rurals
of its sympathies; of the certainty of its forecast.
The other silent,

in the shape it occupies, seen on any clear afternoon
as a shy, gray-brown smallish bird
sometimes hunted for

the meager meat it provides. And quiescent, without
word or sign that it knows the least thing about
the nature of water,

let alone the turbulent seas surrounding Ararat.
The only land in the lonely ocean of the world.
Or for the lack of a better story,

or because a boat just happened to run aground there.
When the great door opened, and inside,
for the first time, the probationer's

chirps, mewlings, barks, growls and gruntings
stopped. And the differentiating mind
received,

if not its olive branch, out of the storm-toss of that animal life,
the heir and emblem to the end of God's
antediluvian wrath.

Outside my own doors the rain crow's sighs soften, melt,
into the already of the gravity stricken pine,
to bend

and further bend there. Of the rain crow, the mourning dove,
and other birds different and the same
in the same bent tree,

perched on separate boughs, a tree brought so low
that here and there touches the ground,
stiff needled, encompassing

by degrees the noon shadow that falls, or, more rightly, is
beneath it. A sun, not yet risen,
that stands rooted,

or seems to. Granted, the sun does not rise
but the eye is brought here to light
by the earth's turning.

And the suddeness of the unexpected, tears
coming down, confounds
that light

configuring, and summering where
light matters and words mean,
or rise to

look for the unheard in a music
responsive to its call.
And to call it in return.

The rain crow is a mourning dove.
 

The Nap

This afternoon, luxury,
I lay down in the shape of my body.
In these clothes that no shape matters,
I may have dreamed.
But, here, brought back in time,
turned out of sleep, the sun
hung in the balance of its journey:
four o'clock
on its down-ward way to five.
Could have been of a different light,
but wasn't.
That those birds in the pig-nut tree
outside the bedroom window spoke
without caring, in what language
I may have overheard,
was, perhaps, in retrospect
an over hearing. The wind
did its windy thing. I cannot
explain how in the leaves there are
semaphores of meaning,
and I in nor hurry to understand.
Or why the telling of this moment
is my own to tell.
Nothing happened. Nothing,
I can say of importance.
Maybe a few walnuts fell
onto the drive.
I later found some there,
last year the same,
along the graveled curve.
Where, once, I sat
in a dark time brooding,
weighted with the freightings of the world.
And was of matter's ruin.
But out of ruin strayed,
new-born, and still
shaky on the palings of its day.
Stood, up from the shadows, a fawn,
light on dappled fur.
And finding me of little interest
walked away.
 

Trimming Back the Burning Bush at Bill Bronk's

                                                 Say,
this one had overgrown its place
by being rooted here.
Or that what had risen to, and over the porch
might bring it down.
Worried the electric lines;
threatened the house within with an inner dark.
                   Yet, better,
say it was the sun's own over-reaching-arch
toward the clearer light, for the greater clarity,
I did what you asked.

It was a bloodless fall with little ornament.

Warmed, as I had to the task,
losing these few remaining drupes:
stoney seeds enclosed beneath the scarlet poise
of their fruit's arils.
          That inner perdurable,
that second skin, living presence of the future-past
In forming November's air
among the deeper shadows
of your greater trees.

                    This euonymous,
slender branches
described in my botany as alate, or winged.
In the language of the body,
double spined, almost cruciform
as if lacking the flesh for the perfection of the round.
But once cut back, as you might have said,
to its singualr source, becomes the stronger
for being made more stark, if a more sever calligraphy: the god
pollarded.
               Or the voice of the god
brought forth out of the self's own wilderness,
now read as the blackened bones
of a possible fire.
Now as fingers pleading
for a hand to stop,
or, if not to stop, to get on with it
and let there be no end.
                    I would
have cleared the lot of every twig,
had you but wished, off every tree
to make it bare.
            Not barren,
but a bare light for you to see
the more of me.
A naked light the dark might take
to shine.
          O,
I know you know its will,
wills all grown back
               in time.
Our graven winter solitary before us,
roots tapped into its own summering embers
banked against the cold,
must hold, or wither
and die

                   out:
first here, then there the greeny sprout,
when next profusion's spring
breaks out.
 

Absence the Greater Presence

O Bill, the valley. Its want,
if there be any want
in a nature at once too near
and too distant to be seen, is not
the valley where your Hudson rows
slow oars past your sleeping
mill-town without you.
From where I stand
looking, as far as this light knows,
the unseen world is a depthless plain
beyond my window's reach: a double
opacity, and by being night
the deeper pall. The mind
with one eye on the weather
cannot see through or into.
The face, in reflection,
more fully obscures
the house, always perilous,
perched on the edge of a steep
decline. Maybe the mice,
holding fort in the walls, feel
what we pretend not to, shore against
knowing what truth there is
to stand on. For all
that I am uncertain, and, faith,
am fool to believe, yet believe
it there. But what do I know
of a world where nothing
is real? The unthinkable world
you thought so.

O Bill, the house is locked.
Is double bound in night
and fog. And we are cold.
Grounded in a cloud.
Nothing to hold onto.
Nothing to let go.

For William Bronk (1918-1999)
"He is perfect now."—Henry Weinfield