Deaf to all birds

It is nigh on 5 a.m. when the birds' nattering swells to a level that is impossible to ignore. First the chickadees, then the towhee and sparrows. Hey, sweetie, hey, sweetie. Drink your tea! Old Sam Peabody Peabody Peabody.
They don't wake me. I've been lying in wait since last night, eyes open behind my lids, so impatient that I divine the songs, whistles and churrs in my sleep the way children hear reindeer hoofs and sleigh bells on the rooftop.
I jump out of bed and dash downstairs to the dinette window, where hours later, laughing, Lou finds me, riveted to the scene unfolding in the yard. Half the time, I have not torn myself away long enough to put the coffee on.
I am bursting with news he has no interest in: the spotting of a chipping sparrow, the frisky frolics of the mourning dove love birds who are still caressing each other's necks. The mockingbirds are the latest arrivals, flashing on the wing; work on woodpecker holes is progressing apace. And where have all the juncos gone?
Three months ago, my mornings were cold, silent in a house that in retrospect was bleak, the archetypal empty nest. Today, I have trouble keeping up with the abundance of chittering life.
So did I move somewhere with a lot of birds, near the aviary or something?
No, I live in the suburban house I grew up in on the edge of mixed deciduous woods that stretch for miles, to Pittsburgh's three rivers to the east, north and south, all the way to the recidivist bald eagles near the banks of the Monongahela, bringing up their third brood in four years since settling back in to western Pennsylvania's recovering riparian landscape.
When I was a kid, my mom kept an old pair of binoculars on the shelf in the den, next to a bird guide I won as a prize in a Young Naturalist program at Carnegie Museum of Natural History. It was pulled down and thumbed through enough to be dog-eared, but if my mom came to know anyone beyond the cardinals and ubiquitous robins, the acquaintance was passing and it wasn't passed on to me.
I couldn't recognize with certainty any of my feathered neighbors aside from those couple of basic residents.
But just like when I got pregnant and the world's population of expectant parents suddenly and visibly mushroomed, it's been raining birds outside my window since embarking on a poetry-bird project on a whim turned birds into my latest obsession.
I hear tufted titmice when I'm driving down a city street in a car with the windows up and chickadees (hybridized black-capped/Carolina?) from inside the classroom during a lecture on native plants. I know it's rude, but I can't keep my eyes from flitting to the house sparrows picking through the leaves while I'm having lunch with a friend. In fact, I have trouble not interrupting her to point out the red-tailed hawk circling or the rock pigeons hopping or, if I'm lucky and the stars align, the Eastern phoebe's tail wagging.
I know enough now to know that I know very little. This should not be a revelation. I have always been something of a generalist. But it is humbling, instructive and sobering to realize yet again that as my appointed time hurtles  toward its inevitable finite limit, I am stumbling aimlessly through the parking lot of life, eyes shut and fingers in my ears, distracted by mindless Internet games or the histrionics of superficial characters on the latest screen of entertainment while ignoring classics, masterpieces, creations of God and human alike.
My grandmother Goldie used to tell the story of a homeowner whose property was always rundown, cottage overflowing with garbage and grime on the windows. The neighbors grumbled, and finally one complained to the rabbi.
"Give him a flower," the wise man suggested.
So the next day, the neighbor showed up at the door with a bouquet of fresh-cut blooms.
The homeowner ran to get a vase. It was dirty, so he washed it out, arranged the flowers and cleared a spot for it on the dining room table. The arrangement was lovely, and the mess on the table was suddenly unbearable. So he stacked the papers, put the dirty dishes in the sink, swept the floor and stood back to admire his work.
But his eye was distracted by the clutter in the kitchen.
He emptied the drainboard, washed the dishes, mopped the floor and took out the trash. Tired from the unexpected exertion, he dragged himself off intending to go to bed. When he opened the door to the bedroom, the mess jumped out at him and he worked long into the night, scrubbing and folding and discarding and dusting until the cottage and yard were spotless — all because of one bouquet of flowers.
I spend my life wandering from one beautiful bouquet to the next, trying to clear away the cobwebs of modern distracted living from my brain. It's easy to wander off into the wilderness of oblivion. But every now and then, like a gnat-catcher flitting from tree to tree, I discover another trail of beauty and wonder to follow.



                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

Highlights of the day

So if you were a bird, you should feel very welcome at my house. Or at least outside my house (inside, you would have to contend with Hank, who would stalk, torment, kill and eviscerate you; and with Pancake, who would run around you a bunch of times and bark, whine and try to throw you in the air like a stick: warning, she eats sticks after splintering them into thousands of slivers. But I do have some composting worms hanging around the kitchen that would make you happy if you are part of the thrush family. And if you had opposable thumbs and could open their Rubbermaid home).
But outside my house in the back yard is an inviting habitat for you birds. There are two feeders filled with safflower seeds, which the mastermind squirrels have not invaded and sabotaged for two days now. There are three suet cages with a variety of suet cakes for the discerning avian creature. There is a metal feeder with wriggling live mealworms bedded in cornmeal. And there is fresh fruit, oh yes, and a bit of veggies left from my morning juice (beets, carrots, apples, orange and ginger root). There is a white oak and lots of underbrush, piles of sticks and scrub and shrubs. On the edge of the woods.
So, please, stop by and visit. There are plenty of friends already here for you: titmice, cardinals, chickadees (likely hybridizing Carolina and black-capped), towhees, robins, finches house and American gold, northern mockingbirds, sparrows of many ilk, blue jays, woodpeckers galore (mostly downy and hairy, with some assertive red-bellied and a couple of here today, gone tomorrow pileated); blackbirds and cowbirds, some Carolina wrens, starlings and mourning doves and I daresay a few grackles; hawks circle overhead but haven't stopped in. Beware the clutches of plotting squirrels... Oh, I almost forgot, out front I am starting to establish a hummingbird feeding station around the butterfly bush. Yes, the flowers are fake. The hummingbirds aren't supposed to know that so please, if you are not a hummingbird, don't tell. And if you are a hummingbird, forget the fake part of what I said -- there are flowers of nectar for you, so please, hummingbirds, come on down.

Check out the poetic forms

Hey visitors!
Make sure you check out blog posts 1 and 2 for a gander at my methodology and the poetic forms I have been playing with. Of course, the poems can be read on their own, but it may enhance the reading experience to understand what parameters of form I am operating around.
And I will be adding the occasional poem from time to time because bird poems are like that.
Oh heck, here are the forms, it's an easy copy and paste from post 2:

Poetic Forms used in “Read the Birds”

I culled most of these poetic forms from Robert Lee Brewer’s Poetic Asides blog on the Writer’s Digest website here: http://www.writersdigest.com/whats-new/list-of-50-poetic-forms-for-poets.

Aside from the villanelle I wrote for Day 2, I mostly wrote free verse until Day 13, when I decided to write a goofy poem for a dead cardinal that my friend Carol and I cavorted about with in college for a few days. I thought it would be fun to juxtapose the silliness with a strict form and decided on the ode, which traditionally uses elevated language. I had so much fun playing with that idea that I then decided to try a different form every day. So most of the poems before Day 13 are free verse; most afterward (except Day 28, what was I thinking? Nothing much) experiment with various forms as explicated upon here:

Villanelle, Day 2: The French villanelle consists of five tercets (a stanza of three lines, I thought they were called triplets!) and a quatrain (four lines). The first and third lines of the first stanza alternate as the third line of each succeeding tercet, and then form a couplet to end the poem. All first and third lines rhyme; all second lines rhyme. Here is the rhyme scheme: A(1)/ b/ A(2); a/ b/ A(1) ; a/b/A(2); a/ b/ A(1); a/b/A(2); a/ b/ A(1)/A(2). Famous examples: Theodore Roethke “The Waking”; Dylan Thomas “Do Not Go Gentle into the Good Night”

Ode, Day 13: Uses elevated language, often in praise of a person not present (here: dead). I used a rhyme scheme for each stanza that goes, roughly: ababcdecde; fgfghijhij; klklmnomno. I thought I got that from somewhere but, looking back, I can’t figure out where. Keats? Wordsworth? They liked odes.

Interlocking Rubaiyat, Day 14: The poem is comprised of quatrains following an aaba rhyme pattern. Each successive quatrain picks up the unrhymed line as the rhyme for that stanza. So a three-stanza rubaiyat might rhyme: aaba/bbcb/ccdc. Sometimes the final stanza rhymes all four lines as did Robert Frost in “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” For fun, I echoed a famous line from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.

Cinquain, Day 15: A five-line poetic form from Adelaide Crapsey, comprised of 2 syllables in the first line, 4 in the second line, 6 in the third, 8 in the fourth, and 2 in the fifth.

Gwawdodyn, Day 16: A Welsh form comprised of quatrains (4-line stanzas) that have a 9/9/10/9 syllable pattern and matching end rhymes on lines 1, 2, and 4. The variations are made in that third line. The one I used has an internal rhyme with the end rhyme on the third line.

Blitz, Day 17: A 50-line form by Robert Keim. Line 1 is a phrase or image. Line 2 starts with the first word in 1. Lines 3 and 4 start with the last word of 2; lines 5 and 6 start with the last word of 4, and so on through 48 lines. Line 49 is the last word of 48; Line 50 is the last word of 47. The title is three words: (first word of 3) (conjunction) (first word of 47); no punctuation.

Sestina, Day 18: Undoubtedly the hardest form I tried. The six words that end each of the lines in the first stanza rotate in a specific pattern throughout the six-stanza main body of the poem; then form a tercet using all six words in the seventh and final stanza. If each end word is assigned a letter (a/b/c/d/e/f), then the repetition goes thus: abcdef; faebdc; cfdabe; ecbfad; deacfb; bdfeca

Pantoum, Day 19: A form from Malay consisting of quatrains with an abab rhyme scheme, repeating lines 2 and 4 from the previous stanza as lines 1 and 3 in the next stanza.

Quatern, Day 20: A French form of 16 8-syllable lines over 4 quatrains. The first line is the refrain. In the second stanza, the refrain is the second line; in the third stanza, the third line; in the fourth stanza, the fourth (and final) line. There are no rules for rhyming or iambics.

Roundabout, Day 21: Form created by poet Sara Diane Doyle and a teen poet she worked with, David Edwards. It’s a four-stanza poem, each stanza consisting of 5 lines. The poem is written in iambic (pairs of unstressed/stressed beats, or feet, per line) and the lines have 4 feet, 3 feet, 2 feet, 2 feet and 3 feet respectively. The rhyme scheme is abccb/bcddc/cdaad/dabba. The second line of each stanza repeats as the final line.

Shadorma, Day 22: A Spanish 6-line syllabic poem of 3/5/3/3/7/5 syllable lines. There you go.

Rhyming couplets, Day 23: Couplets that rhyme. Easy peasy for our guest poet.

Rondeau, Day 24: French form of 15 lines across 3 stanzas with the first word or phrase from the first line represented as a refrain (R) and a rhyme scheme of 2 rhymes throughout (A and B): A(R)/A/B/B/A; A/A/B/R; A/A/B/B/A/R. The A and B lines are usually 8 or 10 syllables in length; I went much shorter. The refrain is usually 1 to 3 words (or so).

List poem, Day 25: The list poem was used by the Greeks and in many books of the Bible. Two popular American poems, Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” and Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” are list poems. Basically, a list poem (or catalog poem) lists things: names, places, actions, thoughts, images, etc.

Chant poem, Day 26: In this form, repetitive lines form a sort of chant. Each line can repeat, or every other line. My Day 7 poem unwittingly was a variation on this open and very flexible form.

Luc bat, Day 27: A Vietnamese form with alternating lines of 6 and 8 syllables. The sixth syllables of each couplet rhyme (my version uses approximate rhymes) with the eighth syllable of the preceding line: xxxxxA; xxxxxAxB; xxxxxB; xxxxxBxC; xxxxxC; xxxxxCxD etc.

Rondel, Day 29: A French form of 13 lines over 3 stanzas. Rhyme scheme: ABba/abAB/abbaA (uppercase letters are refrains); typically 8 syllables a line.

Rispetto, Day 30: Italian form that pays respect, often to a woman. Usually one stanza consisting of eight lines, each of 11 syllables, with a rhyme scheme of ababccdd or abababcc.

Sonnet, Day 31: 14-line sonnet in the Petrarchan form, with the rhyme scheme abba/abba/cdecde. I echoed Milton. Who wouldn’t?

Day 31, Sonnet for a Serial Killer

Day 31, Sonnet for a Serial Killer

You may have thought that you were safe but you are not.

I sit hourly at the window by his side

as his mouth twitches, eyes grow narrow and wide.

They sometimes kill who always stare and plot.

A bird’s span is short, a decade’s all you’ve got

and that’s generous, according to my guide —

unless, that is, we keep all the cats inside

which would give hundreds of millions a year a better shot.

You face a multitude of dangers we might solve:

cars, planes, pesticides, destruction of habitat.

It’s not answers but resolve we lack.

Ages past, the biggest threat was hood and glove,

then, as now, you live at the whimsy of the cat

and his taunt: Once you’re gone, you’re never coming back.

Day 30, Rispetto for my backyard wilderness

Day 30, Rispetto for my backyard wilderness
for my mom, Eileen Kaufman

Crow calls out caution, hawk circles overhead;

a junco shares the feeder with a titmouse.

Squirrels attack the seed bell, rip it to shreds,

I yell, but I don’t mind, the yard is their house.

Mom loved hummingbirds, lady bugs and daisies;

twenty years she’s gone, I still miss her daily.

In her spot I sit, watch birds out her window,

when I lean close, she’s crowding at my elbow.