Pied and
multiplied as
polyphony
do butcherbirds in
twos and threes
choir the forest
into being?
Does mourning of
turtledoves
croon the world
open outside my bedroom
window, bathe my
body in the cool morning
air of a Tuesday,
say, when retired
I wake as I
choose, attend as I choose?
And are such
birdsongs free as birds?
Free and brief
upon the wind as aspen
leaves that clap
their hands in late
afternoon light of
a summer’s day?
So that even when
winds turn north
winter cardinals
practice all
the livelong;
northern mockingbirds toss
ungendered notes
into snow cloud stopping
January air?
But now we hear
that songbirds are dying in
alarming numbers
and that many of those
surviving sing no
more. Messiaen’s Quartet . . .
imagines birdsong
sounding after the time of humans
but Messiaen
couldn’t reckon with habitat loss
and now a
mysterious illness.
It’s loss of the
will to sing that most disturbs—
out of something
like Yeats’s spiritus mundi
loss of birdsong
tells, and we, part animal but lacking
the gift to read
languages that choir forests, streams,
mountains, into
being remain
oblivious to the telling.
Just now I am
remembering
how it felt to be
fourteen and think
I had four years
to grow until I
could graduate
from high school.
It seemed forever,
those four years
and I don't
remember trying to see
beyond them into
any future I might
occupy with my
parents or my friends’
parents or uncles,
aunts, grandparents
teachers, our
family doctor, the mayor.
I think at
fourteen I simply took these things
these people and
the folk around them, world
for granted like
the rising sun and the hard ground
I spaded in the
spring when it was time to replant
bulbs. One year I
dug up a hibernating horned frog
flat and leathery
in my hand; good thing one of the
tines of my
spading fork hadn’t speared it, poor thing
I thought, and
pitched it to one side, whereupon it took
breath, blew
itself into escape mode, and scurried
off. Used to be a
lesson in that; ‘nature is never
spent,’ as some
poet claimed; but in the world
around me now at
eighty something, no kid is empty
of care as I was.
Horned frogs are endangered
horny toads, as we
called them, no longer a staple
of the lives of
West Texas boys like me, their habitats
gone to fire ants,
urban sprawl, and agriculture.
One adult summer
years ago, fire ants built
a nest in my
gravel driveway; I watched it
mushroom almost
overnight until I grew afraid
for my children’s
legs.
The chloral hydrate
I tried first
proved useless and then, worried
that my children
might get into it when my
back was turned, I
finally poured gasoline
into the nest and
sealed the ants inside with a
garbage can lid.
That should gas them, I thought
shying away from
the implication, and it did the
trick for a while,
but they came back.
Lesson there too,
like the lampreys
invading northern waterways.
No fish is safe
now, like the horny toads
—and no kid
either.
—litany
after Leath Tonino’s essay, “The Doe’s Song”
Here’s
the deal; an automobile
speeding
down a night road hits a doe.
The
driver swerves to a stop and tries
to
help, but the panicked animal struggles
away
and scrambles into the woods
on
three legs, its fourth now dangling
useless.
The driver watches helpless as
the
painful struggle passes beyond
the
space made bright by her headlights—
resumes
her journey, frightened, chastened
perhaps,
perhaps not. As the days
go
by afterwards, she will comfort
her
conscience with the thought that the doe
was
only an animal, after all.
Pray
for her and pray for the doe.
Pray
that shock will have taken the doe
before
gangrene, delirium or worse, coyote’s
tooth
as she thrashes about in un-nameable
pain,
knowing now no quiet
place
to lick her wounds. Does she have
a
name? Will her comrades know her
as
something other than roadkill? ‘What of it?’
say
some. ‘Humans have killed animals
since
before we measured time.’ But this
isn’t
hunting; bracket hunting and pray
for
the doe. Pray for her because she is
a
mountaintop gone to strip mines
a
river polluted, filled with black carp
and
lampreys, an aquifer filled with methane.
You
get the point. Bracket hunting.
Pray
for the doe and the many thousands
like
her killed each year on the roads.
They
are plentiful now, suburban enclaves
sometimes
stage hunts for them and give
the
meat to food banks to distribute.
Pray
for the foodbanks and their clients.
Pray
because they are there. Pray
for
the chain of causes required to sustain
their
presence but not the doe’s innocent
life—that
being unsustainable
in
the present human dispensation
her
destiny to be burnt or butchered
and
fed to carnivores in a preserve.
Pray
for the carnivores in their preserve
because
they are there, because the preserve
is
required by the present human
dispensation.
Finally,
pray for an end to pandemic
as
ventilators preserve the lives
of
those who think it a hoax, or not.
Pray
for them—let there be time
of
lamentation, fulsome and
great-hearted
for those who went naked and un-
vaccinated
to their deaths, especially for all
children,
immunocompromised, and others
whose
collateral deaths like that of the doe
were
required by the present human
dispensation.
Julian O.
Long’s poems and essays have appeared in The Sewanee Review, Pembroke
Magazine, New Texas, New Mexico Magazine, and Horizon among others.
His chapbook, High Wire Man, is number twenty-two in the Trilobite
Poetry series published by the University of North Texas Libraries. A
collection of his poems, Reading Evening Prayer in an Empty Church,
appeared from Backroom Window Press in 2018. Online Publications have appeared
or are forthcoming at The Piker Press, Better Than Starbucks, The Raw Art
Review, Litbreak Magazine, and The New Verse News, and CulturMag.
A new collection, If Stone Could Weep: An Epitaph for the Pandemic, is
forthcoming in 2022. Long has taught school at the University of North Texas,
North Carolina State University, and Saint Louis University as well as McMurry
University, Fayetteville (NC) Technical Community College, and Central Carolina
Community College. He is now retired and lives in Saint Louis, Missouri.
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