The greens—myriad, viridescent:
every one of them alive. I see green.
It’s elemental. Magnolias, whose
stately, heavy, sturdy greens replaced
April’s soft white petals on bare branches.
All the prairie grasses, competing,
and beyond, more trees: the oak, ash, and spruce—
evidence. You think. Of what. Belief means
nothing:
you are here, in it.
Being in it is all.
White daisies punctuate.
The green, interrupted,
reminds the eye of its subject. For months,
I convalesce and stare rapt out my window.
Sometimes, I step out:
not even a sidewalk, just a door to
the unpaved world.
A chatbot perches on a wide branch there.
Lyrical code with deep-time programming,
its song complies.
My app confirms
the presence of sparrows and finches.
The red-winged blackbirds
have quieted.
(They screech when the dog nears the nests.)
The same dog barks on the recording
for the app.
We filter,
all of us:
as the app untangles piled wave forms,
parses the unique songs of specific birds,
subtracts the dog,
I do the same.
And further out,
sun and wind conspire—my eyes dart
to the foreground. Now a bird also darts—
my eye and the bird dart together—
the wind turns colors over colors.
With finite eyes I watch a tiny finch
spend the morning balancing on rasp-
berry vines, fluttering at the window,
beating against the glass—
as if it could get purchase on the reflection
of the vines it staggers on.
Another bird, head cocked, watches me
walking in figure eights, circling toward
the glass, widening my loops—
as if I could boost my recovery
in that windowed room
in that dimmed state.
So, birds can’t transpose—as in recognize
their own pitch-perfect song, heard in a different
key. I hear that whales transpose
their own song
to a soprano register to speak
to dolphins. Why does this matter. It does.
Pan out—out! For at least a thousand
years, crumbled diatoms and catfish remains
of the dusty basin of Lake Mega Chad
have crossed the entire Atlantic
to fertilize the phosphorus-poor soil
(drained from the rain) of the Amazon.
Does what I know point to more than itself.
I imagine we are beastly bots, our pattern
of chatter modeled from those before.
What follows.
Willow flycatchers, western meadowlarks:
I am finally specific. I am
chatty today. It is deeply scripted.
And I, when stirred,
absurdly, must be heard.
What do I know. Yellow
element, unpaved words widening.
In that same room of light and entry:
my piano. And just now when the theme
returns for the final time, I begin
to play louder, faster— I can’t help it—
and in my periphery, barn swallows
dive in time—a quickening—so many
swoop from such great heights, as if
choreographed. By whom, I want to ask.
By what. Does the desert care by whom.
Does the forest care by what. It happens,
this concert, this earth impacting earth, and
for a moment, the birds and I are quiet.
This poem appears in our fall 2023 issue, Conjunctions:81, Numina: The Enchantment Issue.