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The Poets’ Birds ~ The Shy and Silent Ones
Juvenile yellow-crowned night heron (Nyctanassa violacea) That it was shy when alive goes without saying. We know it vanished at the sound of voices Or footsteps. It took wing at the slightest...
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When Carl Linnaeus Meets T.S. Eliot
Texas bluebonnets (Lupinus texensis) on the Willow City Loop I’ve always considered the phrase “flash of inspiration” to be mostly metaphorical, but it perfectly describes a recent experience. In the...
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The Poets’ Birds: Osprey
“Osprey” ~ John James Audubon Oh, large, brown, thickly feathered creature with a distinctive white head, you, perched on the top branch of a tree near the lake shore, as soon as I guide this boat...
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Breeze
Had this breeze refused an evening rising, we might have missed such clouds; such silent, feathered gliding down hidden, sharp-edged currents; such easy slope toward night. Had this breeze not risen,...
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The Poets’ Birds: Ducks
Black-bellied whistling duck (Dendrocygna autumnalis) For years, every morning, I drank from Blackwater Pond. It was flavored with oak leaves and also, no doubt, the feet of ducks. And always it...
View ArticleThe Poets’ Birds: Vultures
Turkey vultures (Cathartes aura) ~ Brazoria Wildlife Refuge There’s nothing unusual about seeing vultures in Texas, but a pair of turkey vultures taking the sun on a gently disintegrating windmill...
View ArticleLiving Outside The Lines
Color Us Content ~ c. 1950 Apricot. Bittersweet. Burnt Sienna. Cornflower. Maize. Mahogany. Melon. Those of us who grew up between 1949 and 1957 may remember those colors with special affection. Clear...
View ArticleA Small Creature, But A Great Grief
To say the end was unexpected hardly would be true. For months there had been signs of age taking its toll; in past weeks there had been increasing restlessness; discontented murmurings; howls in the...
View ArticleThe Poets’ Birds: Mockingbird
Northern Mockingbird (Mimus polyglottos) on Galveston Island My mother noticed the sound first, drawing my attention to it with a question. “How do you suppose a duck got up on the roof?” Surprised, I...
View ArticleThe Coastal Dwellers’ Lament
A preview of things to come Sumer is icumen in, and faint eddies of ambivalence have begun to swirl along the Texas coast. We love our summers, but despite the season’s delights, we know we’ll soon...
View ArticleThe Poets’ Birds: Robins
Proust had his madeleines. I have my robins. The murmuring of robins evokes for me a quieter, more gracious world: childhood summers filled with the soft, shallow breathing of curtains at the window;...
View ArticleThe Poet’s Birds: The Perchers
Scissor-tailed flycatcher (Tyrannus forficatus) perched along a Galveston West End bayou While herons and robins, egrets and larks receive multitudes of mentions in poetry — if not complete poems...
View ArticleThe Poets’ Birds: The Hidden Ones
Mourning dove (Zenaida macroura) Solitary, quiet, the dove lingers: perhaps one of the pair that tended their nest in a nearby palm, or perhaps even their youngster, satisfied with the neighborhood and...
View ArticleThe Poets’ Birds: Blackbirds
Meet Isoceles, the grackle with the triangular perch Strictly speaking, this handsome bird is a grackle rather than a blackbird: specifically, a boat-tailed grackle (Quiscalus major). Often seen...
View ArticleWho’s To Say?
Fading but still recognizable, the coneflower drowsing in late afternoon sunlight seemed oblivious to the laughter surrounding it. “Look!” said the friend who knows me well enough to know the reason...
View ArticleOn Going to the Barn at Christmas
Says a country legend told every year: Go to the barn on Christmas Eve and see what the creatures do as that long night tips over. Down on their knees they will go, the fire of an old memory...
View ArticleA New Year’s Raid on the Inarticulate
The sky lowers, and the horizon disappears. A turning wind attempts to blanket the moon with sea-born fog, shrouding the contours of its face. Impassive, harshly brilliant above the fog, it rises...
View ArticleA Season Speaks
Amethyst Brook Falls, Massachusetts ~ Stephen Gingold The Grammarian In Winter Winter speaks in passive voice, conjugates brief slants of light, parses out cold stars along a tracery of oak. Beneath...
View ArticleTears, Laughter, and Love
It was the simplest of exchanges. On the day poet Mary Oliver died, I responded to a reader’s acknowledgement of her passing by saying, “Yes, and I was surprised by the depth of my grief. I don’t...
View ArticleA Poem for a Poet
departure Woods walker, wanderer, wisdom seeker: she willed us along beneath willows and oaks toward the life-giving water of words. See, she says, how they rise and flow ~ quenching imagination’s...
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