A Line of Birds

Poem No. 178

It’s cold here, and rainy. The hills are threaded with mist in a way that stirs something in the heart, and — when visible through breaks in the clouds — snow can be seen on the mountains, making patient advance toward the valleys.

Winter approaches, and after a busy season I look forward to the stillness.

The weather has reminded me of a poem I sketched last fall, just a few days after I started this newsletter. It’s something of an aberration for me. I typically try for a direct, concise voice in my prose and poetry. (Try and often fail — my fingers do so love typing a bit of flowery, purple prose.) But in my visual art practice I work almost solely in abstract expressionism, and something of that bled over here, into a poem that feels finished yet whose full meaning still eludes me:

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Untitled

A line of birds takes flight
from the crest of our home 
and I do not know their names.

They form a curve
then a chaos
then a line again

pearled along the high tension wire
stretching into the mountains
and I do not know their ages,

nor how many will survive
the coming winter
to grace again our roof in spring.

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There’s something here I quite like, that I don’t think would work as well if I leaned into my typical mode and removed the abstractions, especially the strangeness around not knowing ‘their’ ages. Whose ages? The birds? The mountains? The manmade pylons carrying power over the horizon?

I honestly don’t know.

But I do know this poem makes me feel the turning of the seasons, somehow. The welcoming of the symbolic death that is winter and the season of silence and darkness and peace. Of the renewal it promises, waiting for us on the other side.

In the author’s note to her novel The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. LeGuin wrote something I think about a lot when I sit down to write:

The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.

I’m working on the first draft of a new novel this month, and I feel her sentiment quite deeply — novelists ‘say in words what cannot be said in words.’ I don’t think Ursula would mind at all if I include a bit of poetry under the same umbrella.

I hope my poem this week finds you well, and looking forward to a little stillness,
~ A

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