The whisper of feathers

Have you ever heard the soft flutter of the wings of geese?

I don’t mean the loud clatter that occurs when they honk and beep and jockey about for first position in their signature V. I mean the softest of sounds, like a breeze brushing your check on a warm day; when you sense before you see?

As I was taking this picture of Lake Katherine, I heard an almost imperceptible sound as the camera was adjusting its eye. Just then two Canadian geese flew but a few yards above my head. They made not a sound. No warning. Just the whisper of air between their feathers.

Back home, downloading (or is it uploading?) the sixty of so photos of a short walk around a lake, I zoomed in closer on the one above. I was trying to capture the reflections of the shoreline on the water. I discovered that I had inadvertently captured the pair of geese who brushed past me. There, in the photo, are not only the geese, but their reflections. If you click onto the picture above and pan to the right you can see them.

I remembered a poem by Mary Oliver, Wild Geese, and went about trying to find in online, which I did, with the bonus of her actually reading it. The poem didn’t quite fit the picture, however, so, I kept the photo in abeyance, letting it sit and steep like a cup of tea.

When you let something sit brewing, you often get just what you were waiting for. That happened this morning. I have bookmarked a nice little site with the imprint of Garrison Keillor, that all American master of words. I clicked on The Almanac this morning, and there appeared a poem I didn’t know existed,. It fluttered about me like the wings of the geese from a week ago, and it gave me the words to hang upon the swans that I saw yesterday.

Water Picture, by May Swenson

In the pond in the park
all things are doubled:
Long buildings hang and
wriggle gently. Chimneys
are bent legs bouncing
on clouds below. A flag
wags like a fishhook
down there in the sky.

The arched stone bridge
is an eye, with underlid
in the water. In its lens
dip crinkled heads with hats
that don’t fall off. Dogs go by,
barking on their backs.
A baby, taken to feed the
ducks, dangles upside-down,
a pink balloon for a buoy.

Treetops deploy a haze of
cherry bloom for roots,
where birds coast belly-up
in the glass bowl of a hill;
from its bottom a bunch
of peanut-munching children
is suspended by their
sneakers, waveringly.

A swan, with twin necks
forming the figure 3,
steers between two dimpled
towers doubled. Fondly
hissing, she kisses herself,
and all the scene is troubled:
water-windows splinter,
tree-limbs tangle, the bridge
folds like a fan.

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Hunting

The screeching came this summer; mid afternoon ’round three o’clock. Neither of us could tell where it was coming from at first, nor what. I would hear it weeding and watering, especially out back, and Tom could hear it, even with windows closed, up in the barn where his office is.

I wandered back, deep into the yard,, inching my steps, watching, looking to the tree tops for a nest. Suddenly, a swoosh. A large, white underbelly showed; soaring, searching, screeching. My eyes followed it as it hunted, then swooped down, and vanished from view.

We have hawks and other large birds of prey here on the Cutoff and often see them. I’ve watched the red tailed hawks “dancing” in the sky in courtship . It is a sight to behold. They are most often seen atop a branch or pole, looking for prey. In the six years we have been here, however, I’ve never heard them as I’ve heard them this summer, come mid-afternoon, here on the Cutoff.

Image from National Geographic

 

Hawk

This morning

the hawk

rose up

out of the meadow’s browse

and swung over the lake –

it settled

on the small black dome

of a dead pine,

alert as an admiral,

its profile

distinguished with sideburns

the color of smoke,

and I said: remember

this is not something

of the red fire, this is

heaven’s fistful

of death and destruction,

and the hawk hooked

one exquisite foot

onto a last twig

to look deeper

into the yellow reeds

along the edges of the water

and I said: remember

the tree, the cave,

the white lilly of resurrection,

and that’s when it simply lifted

its golden feet and floated

into the wind, belly-first,

and then it cruised along the lake –

all the time its eyes fastened

harder than love on some

uninimportant rustling in the

yellow reeds — and then it

seemed to crouch high in the air, and then it

turned into a white blade, which fell.

                                                                           From New and Selected Poems.

                                                          Mary Oliver

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Simply put

The 2012 National Poetry Month poster, designed by Chin-Yee Lai.

Did you know that April is National Poetry Month?

For a month that begins with its first day a “fools” day, I thought I would instead give you a poem by Mary Oliver. I hope you enjoy it and that you find a few poems to read during the month of April.

I Want to Write Something So Simply

I want to write something

so simply

about love

or about pain

that even

as you are reading

you feel it

and as you read

you keep feeling it

and though it may be my story

it will be known to you

so that by the end

you will think -

no, you will realize -

that it was all the while

yourself arranging the words,

that it was all the time

words that you yourself,

out of your own heart

had been saying.

                              Mary Oliver, Evidence

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. . . where you are.

On my library visits, I have been making it a point to bring home a book or two of poetry. Poets I know and poets I don’t find their way into my arms as I attempt to broaden my poetic horizons. Most recently, New and Selected Poems, by Mary Oliver, has been sitting at my side. I bookmarked (with a real book mark) The Black Walnut Tree.  I’ve read this poem a few times over, thinking about our own trees here on the Cutoff and our walnut harvest last fall.

I was so sorry to hear through Nan’s blog, Letters from a Hill Farm, that Mary Oliver has cancelled all speaking engagements. She has taken ill.  As I thumbed through the book this morning, another poem presented itself to me. Poems have a way of doing that, don’t they? They sit and wait until just the right time to introduce themselves. I thought it might be fitting way to honor Mary Oliver by posting it today.

The picture is ours, one of hundreds taken at Walden Pond, but the message I hear from the poem is a simple one. As simple as the idea of Walden. It is wherever you are.

Going to Walden
Mary Oliver

It isn’t very far as highways lie.
I might be back by nightfall, having seen
The rough pines, and the stones, and the clear water
Friends argue that I might be wiser for it.
They do not hear that far-off Yankee whisper:
How dull we grow from hurrying here and there!

Many have gone, and think me half a fool
To miss a day away in the cool country.
Maybe.  But in a book I read and cherish,
Going to Walden is not so easy a thing
As a green visit.   It is the slow and difficult
Trick of living, and finding it where you are.

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In Blackwater Woods. Mary Oliver

In Blackwater Woods

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

Mary Oliver. American Primitive

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“When I Am Among the Trees”

Around me the trees stir in their leaves

and call out “Stay awhile.”

The light flows from their branches.

And they call me again, “It’s simple,” they say

“and you too have come

into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled

with light and to shine.”

from the poem, “When I Am Among the Trees” by Mary Oliver

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