“Oh, little red bird come to my window sill
Been so lonesome, shaking that morning chill
Oh, little red bird open your mouth and say
Been so lonesome, just about flown away

So long now I've been out
In the rain and snow
But winter's come and gone
A little bird told me so”

            -from “Winter’s Come and Gone” by Gillian Welch

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4WwYh8Vifo

 I have a particular affinity for birds, almost as extensions of my spirit.  I used to identify with the dark scavengers of the prairie and desert, especially crows, ravens and magpies.  They had a way of working themselves into my poems and stories and dreams.  But eventually their darkness clouded my spirit, so I’m on a mission to find a new spirit bird. 

 

I had the chance the other night to walk the dirt road of my childhood as I watched some beautiful storms build on the horizon and creep closer.  And while I saw plenty of crows pestering a herd of sleepy buffalo, trying to land on their backs, I decided I’m no longer a crow but rather one of the mosquito-eating songbirds along the fencerows and high wires of the countryside.  Perhaps an oriole, because its sweet, mysterious call haunts my rural childhood memories.  Or maybe the handsome and aerobatic scissor tail fly catcher.  I walked up and down the dirt road yesterday looking for either, but I guess they are still on their flight path towards Oklahoma from the south. 

 

 

This photo of fuzzy green moss covers the ground where an old homestead once stood, nothing left but a collapsed rough stone basement.  I used to play there as a child, and I remember vividly finding a carved human face in one of the large boulders in the basement wall.  From archaeological evidence (lots of charred wood and dating of the glass jars), my daughter and I know the house burned in the 1930s when the great depression and dustbowl were catastrophic to most people living here.   After some incipient archaeological “excavations” in and around what’s left of the old house, We found broken bits of colorful glass medicine bottles and china, a rusted tin, a beautiful piece of polished flint, all pieces of old trash that I cherish very much. 

 

 

And there, just over that rise in the prairie behind this horse, is where I used to swim and fish as a child, in a large stock pond, amongst the snapping and venomous swimming creatures of the earth.  I can still taste the muddy water and smell the sweet horse shit in the pasture.  I find it somewhat embarrassing to admit I find the smell of horses and horse shit somewhat appealing, kind of like the smell of a dogs paws (as Michael Ondaatje wrote about in The English Patient).