“Crows live in the heart of the forest.  They want the trees to go back to seed.  Crow’s dark life the color of night is stored sun, grain full of summer.  It lives like we live off those before us, those living in clay whose bones survive like broken pots of tribes . . . that were here before the Americans from broken worlds.”

            -from the poem “Breaking” by Linda Hogan

IF I BECOME A BIRD TOMORROW

It will be the one I saw flying overhead at dusk with a brilliant crimson breast. Maybe it was not a bird but a burning ember flying? 

Last year I turned into a cat so I could sneak into the Ka Faroshi bird market in Kabul.  At dawn I opened the doors to all the birdcages, as thousands of finches, canaries and budgerigars became a rainbow in the sky.  

She had an open birdcage tattooed on a hip, her little baby bird that got away.  

When mockingbirds appear in strange ways, I pay attention.  This morning one sang from a snowy branch, the first one I have seen in the dead of 46 winters.  It sounded dreadful by mockingbird standards, as if suddenly realizing some great miscalculation.

The mockingbird reminded me that birds are my heroes too, like Leonard Cohen and Ashraf Ghani, President of Afghanistan.  Leonard Cohen is also one of President Ghani’s heroes, and this is his favorite song. 

“The Partisan” by Leonard Cohen:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RYy_8u4blk

If there were no birds or poems or daughters I’d likely jump off a high cliff into the sea, unlike Lorca who was pushed.  No, I will never fly but sleep with feathers under my head. 

To share a secret language, a private religion of small gods not big ones.

To be able to say everyday there are still firsts. 

To know the beauty in suffering, the suffering of the beautiful.

To know what it feels like to be the child of a revolution.

To know she exists in a world where billions are barely conscious of it.  

To still be blessed with tiny miracles.

To know that birds bring them to me.

The sound of watercolor clouds vibrating

on their march northward

“A tiny spark, or the slow-moving glow on the fuse.  In petrol, saltpeter, mine gas, buzzing minerals in the ground, are waiting.  Humanity, said Jeffers, is like a quick explosion on the planet.  We’re lose on earth half a million years, our weird blast spreading – and after, rubble.”

-from the poem “Loose on Earth”, author unknown

Shawnee, Oklahoma

“I examine the faces of the sleeping dogs beside me, the improbable mystery of their existence, the short lives they live with an intensity unbearable to us.  I have turned to them for their ancient language not my own, being quite willing to give up my language that so easily forgets the world outside itself.”

            -from the poem “Late” by Jim Harrison

Bonnie and Clyde Bridge

South Canadian River

Wanette, Oklahoma

“When he shall die

Take him and cut him out in little stars

And he will make the face of heaven so fine

That all the world will be in love with night

And pay no worship to the garish sun”

        -William Shakespeare