Inland

Gulls circle above my living room window
in and out of low smoky clouds
lording over crows huddled in firs.
Snow is coming. In some places it's here already.
The birds know this as well as I. A pair

of gulls drops toward a roof across the street.

One gull lands but the other touches and must go.

I am not a gull but I think the visual cues failed him.

The distances are shorter here away from the water.

He tries again but concludes he is too big.

The crows express their wild delight. The gulls come

for shelter. There is food here. Peanuts, for example,

unsalted, unroasted, unshelled. The way crows like.

Redmond Watershed Preserve

It is hard to see the mountain for the forest. This time
of year it is easier. After an early snow blackberries
and wild roses lay flattened. The storm shook loose
all but a few maple and alder leaves and revealed
ravines that brooks trace between hillsides of cedar
and Douglas Fir, salal and ferns. It is clear to me now,
after years walking here, how this watershed tilts rain

and snow toward the sea. I listen for the sound one leaf
makes when it strikes another, or when another buckles
under a sparrow's weight. If I listen long enough

I hear the song the frost sings, the ravine sings, and 

where salmon end their run.

Pacific Wren

A noisy brown ping pong ball jumped
up from the trail and velcroed itself
to the trunk of a Douglas Fir. It cocked

its head to best keep an eye on me.
One earlier lay still on the path.
The scavengers hadn't found it yet.

I didn't kneel and use forceps as some
do to examine its final meal. It lay on
a trail--why not suspect the trail?

Generally wrens stay near the ground where
the food is. Where a sword fern scares
the hawk away. When I play the wren’s

song, sometimes it comes. The song
of rubber tires speeding through gravel
isn’t food is it? It’s not a mate singing.

One horse rider attached a jingly bell
to her horse’s halter because on this
trail once they came upon a bear.

I looked up to the crow
on the power line.
There's dignity in silence
we thought.

Previously, me and crows.

The Jay Calls

Birds erupt outside my hotel window.
Cardinal, wren, robin.
Yack Yack Yack. All aflutter.

Is it about to rain or has Jack returned from nowhere?

He used to stay in the canopy riding the waves
wind and currents presented him,
but the leaves are still against the sky.

Was there ever anything more beautiful
than his sea soaked eyelashes when he tired
and came back dripping to his towel?

The jay calls.

So thirsty he was. Still I can’t look to see his face.

Passaic Headwaters

I came here a lot with Jack after he died.
Now I’m back for the wood thrush I suppose,
and the gnats and mosquitoes.

I take my time along the path. My phone and I
listen for birds. A woodpecker drums
to tell his mate he’s near. My guess a flicker.

Where the sun breaks through the canopy
the smell of warm earth envelops me.
I feel the plants' breath. It's almost visible.

Fronds and leaves and limbs extend.
Some itchy, some sticky. Some burn.
The trail cuts back and the headwaters

are suddenly as loud as a boy splashing down
a ledge or two then quieting into the flowing creek.
I find his spot. It isn’t hard; it’s where sneakers

get soaked through and through. I kneel. Feel
the cool stone through my jeans. Surely spring rains
and snow melt years ago carried him to sea.

A blue jay calls from deep in the leaves. Muffled.
No barking. No giggling. No chasing fireflies.
A common jeering blue jay almost makes me cry.

He calls again.

Even as I lift my Face to Rain

No matter how hard

I try to convince myself

that beyond that spot of water

is the Orient way west

past Hurricane Ridge

across the rolling Pacific.

That bit of water

I see down the gloomy street

under the gloomy sky

is the lake not the sound

teeming with salmon.

But What about the Honey?

-         - September, 2015

There was only one candidate, really, that had so many opposite pairs

of small rounded leaves.

We saw it first, if you ever see anything a first time,

waiting for the bus to Orient.

The field guide insisted on thorns. Long thorns, strong enough

to nail shingles to a roof.

And pods full of seeds swimming in pulp that tasted of honey?

It was a legume for god's sake.

Its roots probably bound nitrogen.

I trusted its identity when I found the female.

Her branches were sagging. She was overwhelmed
with pods--weeping like a willow.

What towns wanted were fruitless, thornless males.

Fewer seedlings to weed. Less bird shit

smeared across windshields. Can one female keep parked rows
of males healthy? Will they keep her

brimming with seeds each fall? Why do poems about stones,
tumbling in forever receding waters,

make me so fucking sad?

The Mournful Song of the Varied Thrush

In the early days before the internet,

before all these portable devices,
before location – you remember –

how did we know when the sun would rise?

How did we know those long clear notes

coming through the trees
are sung by a solitary thrush?

We don’t need to know to stop and listen,
but give his loss a name and others might hear.

When you are a crow and you are

forever looking down on people,
do you find you still think highly of them?

Take care of your goldfish

In the October 16 NYT Trilobites blog, we learned, what some of us have long suspected, fish get depressed. "The trigger for most domestic fish depression is likely lack of stimulation," reported Heather Murphy. Fish are naturally curious, Murphy quotes Dr. Victoria Braithwaite who recommends adding new objects to your fish tank, or moving them around.

Since at least in 2008, it has been common knowledge that low levels of anti-depressants are making their way out of our bodies, through the waste stream, and into the ocean (and back into our supply of drinking water). Fairly contained bodies of water, like Puget Sound, don't get flushed thoroughly. Here's a recent summary from 2016 on Vice (and abstract for the underlying research.)

For my Bay Area friends: Drugs in Water.

Here's a poem from five years ago about barnacles and the gasping ssri sea.

If you recall Darwin made his name in barnacles before publishing On the Origin of Species. His friend and mentor, Joseph Hooker, told Darwin that he and his fellow scientists would have little confidence in any speculation about the possibility of species evolving if it came from someone who had not done the real, nitty-gritty taxonomic work of describing some group in detail. Darwin replied to Hooker: “How painfully (to me) true is your remark.” He chose barnacles; he'd collected many in his travels. (Source: Naming Nature.)

In 1854, after 8 years of studying barnacles, Darwin wrote, "I hate a barnacle as no man ever did before, not even a sailor in a slow moving ship."

Just do what you can do. Take care of your goldfish.

More on songbirds, from Annie Dillard

Nature is vaster than we will ever perceive.

"Our meaningful activity scarcely covers the terrain. We do not use the songbirds for instance. We do not eat many of them; we cannot befriend them; we cannot persuade them to eat more mosquitoes or plant fewer weed seeds.

"[Their] show would play to an empty house, as do falling stars which fall in the daytime.

"That is why I take walks."

From pages 72, 73 of the 1982 edition of Teaching a Stone to Talk.

"When Women Were Birds"

From Terry Tempest Williams, pg 205 of When Women Were Birds,

Once upon a time
when women were birds
there was the simple understanding
that to sing at dawn
and to sing at dusk
was to heal the world with joy.

TTW cites the hermit thrush; the song sparrow.

Eve took the apple from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and is no longer a bird. On pg 89, TTW writes "What I came to appreciate was how the transgression of Eve was an act of courage that led us out of the garden into the wilderness."

The garden is filled with mosquitoes, thorns, predators and prey. We are predators. A wasp stings; poison ivy burns. Biting the apple is revelation. A garden more clearly perceived is a wild place.

TTW concludes "there is comfort in keeping what is sacred inside, not as a secret, but as a prayer. "  The sacred is that which must be kept private.

Pg 92, "The world begins with yes."

The 5 Types of Poems

1. Songs
2. Companion calls
3. Territorial aggression (often male to male)
4. Adolescent begging
5. Alarms

Found in What the Robin Knows by Jon Young.

Reading Heinrich's "A Year in the Maine Woods"

Build a nest-level blind in a maple tree.
Clear shrubs near seep for a pond.
Cut brush for a view of the mountain
or for a grassy bank down by the brook.
These naturalist memoirs seduce us
as the authors themselves are seduced
by a shiny new purpose--an old apple orchard
returned to the sun--brewing coffee on a stove
fueled by hardwood you limbed, hauled, sawed
and split. Honest about midges and horseflies,
but seductive the way washing your car is not.
Unless you don't have a car
and you hear Sheryl Crow and it's sunny
and the hot is softened by a pretty steady breeze
blocks inland but still smelling of Sound.

Two Crows One Stone

Two Crows One Stone

Nice thing about a slingshot

you don’t have to carry a clip.

A slingshot wants for accuracy

but there's lots of ammo lying around.

For a broken fledgling

and the parent guarding,

what went up came down.

All the shouting and swooping--

it’s not that they’re stupid--

an intelligent species like us--

they feel it helps.