WILD BLUE YONDER

I am a birder, not a bird. Nevertheless, I write poems. And it is a kind of singing though every birder knows that for an offspring via lust, or for territory, it’s mainly male birds (save the fair-minded Cardinals, Grosbeaks, perhaps a few others) that hold forth, a rule to which the literary mafia held its human poets for centuries.

There are categories, though, regardless of which gender gets to sing. Among birds, we have the Duos, those mating for life. Or the Solitaries, pretty much single-by-choice most of their days, thank you very much. Or Flock Birds—swallows or those heart-stopping elegant Cedar Waxwings—ho-hum-assuming the whole clan will hunt and gather and sometimes nest together, an inborn habit, a kind of cacophonous repetitive chamber music when they do sing.

All this clumping up or not seems natural for poets too. Robinson Jeffers, Marianne Moore, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Robert Hayden, Laura Jensen, Philip Larkin, Rosemary Tonks, and of course Dickinson, all emphatically or quietly one-offs, our Solitary Creepers, those small thrushes that tear your heart out, circling a single tree as solo figures, scrounging under the bark for breakfast at dawn. Meanwhile, the Duos for life, the Cardinals or Eagles: Robert Bly and James Wright, a vivid emphatic twosome-for-the-art, utter disciples for it once up in Minnesota, digging down for the deep image right there under the surface, to reveal