Specimen of a Speculative Oologist
3.4
Grus americana
There is a children’s rhyme that goes like this:
“My dame has a lame tame crane.
My dame has a crane that is lame.
Oh, please, gentle Jane,
let my dame’s lame tame crane
feed and come home again.”
Is this where it starts? The disappearance of a species into human language. Metrically the song is butchered, doused in rhyme to mask its inadequacies. Sounding nothing like the whooping crane’s trilling KrooooOoooo. Perfectly trochaic. Stressed syllable rippling into unstressed. Like water over jagged rocks.
5.1
Bubo virginianus
Sitting on my boyfriend’s lap we read Allison Townsend. I squeeze his hand when I’m ready for him to turn the page or for emphasis and through some unidentified instinct, he’s able to decipher which I mean. I want to stop. Start over. Read this one out loud because I need to know how each word tastes in my mouth. “Between Green Flannel Sheets Splattered with Portuguese Roses” — I hold the title between my teeth. I need to memorize the shape of each vowel with my tongue, let meaning sink into me through my taste buds.
“All night, in the middle of winter,
the great horned owls call around our hill,
their who’s awake, me too drifting
through the bare branches, soft as smoke,
soft as their loosely packed feathers engineered
to move through air without making a sound.”
I want to pause here. Examine this foothold before toeing for the next. Pause to question how much weight one word can hold. The “our” slips silently in and amongst the rounded vowels of the line; it is unobtrusive. And because of this, the “our” is undefined. There is the “our” of the couple just as there is the “our” of both the couple and owls. I like to think Townsend meant the latter and that this means that it could be my hill too. But the owls’ calls gather around the hill, not inside it. The layers of the poem exist like concentric rings in a tree; owls moving in towards the hill, towards the house, towards the ears of the couple drifting off to sleep in their bed.
Still, the owls and humans share space. They share a syllable “who” and what results is the merging of two voices. The voice of the owl and the voice of a poet turned translator.
1.1
Turdus migratorius
I’ve yet to find a poem worthy of the backyard bird. The overlooked bird. The generic bird. The bird that gives itself to this dialogue between a grandfather and his granddaughter my sister:
“Look, Hannah, it’s a robin.”
“No.” Her arms are crossed. The sliver of her belly poking out from a too small Tinkerbelle shirt. “That’s not a robin. It’s a bird.”
To locate a robin you must attune yourself to the sound of joy. Cheerily, cheer up, cheer up, cheerily, cheer up.
To locate a robin you must attune yourself to the sound of rivals. Cuck, Cuck. Cuckold.
To locate a robin you must attune yourself to the sound of alarm: Peek (a breath). Peek (a breath). Peek (they’re gone).
To locate a robin you must learn that the alarm was raised in response to you.
5.1
Bubo virginianus
Most of my memories are like this. They fold in on each other like a fan. I cannot find the book with Townsend’s poems. I cannot find it because now I remember. Yes, I remember. He was not with me when I read it. But he sent it to me because the nameless couple in the dead of winter is us. Gray flannel sheets instead of green.
“Now, in the burnt-down nub, the raw beginning,
they are mating, the murmurous calls flung out
in lassos of sound that seem to circle
our house as we lie awake, eavesdropping
on this primal call-and-response, this avian
love song. As if it can tell us something
about ourselves as we curl, impossibly human
and other, in the nest of our bed, our green
flannel sheets splattered with Portuguese roses.”
Here lies what some might call an ecological conundrum; the human becomes other. Impossibly other. Magnificently other. The owls’ song is not meant for us and Townsend knows this, clings to it anyway. As humans, we are the silence between the “call-and-response.” The nonfactor. As silence, we look to the voice to teach us something.
Reader let me show you the shape of silence. Just this once, go to bed with the curtains open. The lights are off. No one can see in. Listen for the sound of the Great Horned Owl; trust that you will know when you hear it. Feel the tightening of your partner’s arms around you and the deep exhale of their breath against your neck. There. In the pause. In the way your bodies are twined into one, is the shape of your silence. Sleep there. In the morning the mold of your sheets will hold it until you return.
12.6
Poecile atricapillus
I only remember waking up before my boyfriend once. It’s so early that the lofted bedroom, our rumpled nest, is still painted in lilac light and sounds are softened by the Oregon mist. Maybe it’s the cold that woke me, or the murmur of his snoring and I try not to wake him as I pull the plush comforter over my bare shoulders. But I don’t know how to hold this moment alone. I don’t know what words I would be able to use to tell him exactly what shade of purple the shadows are or how together we were, how everything suddenly existed alongside us. Impatient, I rub his leg with my foot and relax into him when he wakes and pulls me against his chest. And although I don’t say it, I know that this is how it will always be.
Past the window, perhaps in the overgrowth of our neighbor’s potted trees is a black-capped chickadee. He does not ask me if I can hear it. Neither of us can mistake the chiseled chicka-dee-dee-dee. I feel his lips on the back of my neck and I squeeze his hand once as we lay silent, somehow altered by this world that exists beyond our own.
We can’t tell if the second chicka-dee is a call or response. Our ears are not sensitive enough to parse out the biological map of each bird’s vocal upbringing. Together, in our lofted nest of synthetic fabric and memory foam, we covet what’s not meant for us. When the calls stop and the light is warmer, I feel him shift. Subtle, resting his knee between my thighs. But in the dense quiet it screams I want, I want, I want. And we do want. The air is cold, and I press my toes against his calf to warm them, smiling when he flinches, our lips pressed together, aggressive and human.
In the kitchen, I show him the branch I imagined the bird would be perched on. It is bare. Still. A moment later we hear it. Chicka-dee-dee-dee. The sound is not far off. And in that moment of sound. Sound without body. We attune ourselves to a different kind of knowing. As I lean against him, my toes brushing the glass of the sliding backdoor, I give in and imagine part of the song is for me. A gentle I am here, here, here. And as if to answer, his arms wrap tighter around me.
5.1
Bubo virginianus
Here is the second stanza. I’ve saved it for you, see?
“When we first moved here, I thought it seemed
a hard thing, mating as owls do, in the dead
of winter, their eggs laid in February or March
in a nest stolen from crows, great blue herons,
or hawks. I pitied the female, protecting
the brood as the wind tore through the oaks,
wondering how she kept warm, though I knew
the male fed her. But now it makes sense, not
lonely at all but ferocious as they are,
and mated for life, winging through the dark blue
air, the country night powdered thick with stars
one cannot see the city. The owls can hear
a mouse moving beneath a foot of snow,
and their eyes close from the top down, like humans.
Though they are not like us at all.
Though it is our luck to lie here,
overhearing the way the male calls out
in his low voice and the female answers,
the I’m here, I’m here, I’m here not
so different then when we call Whoo-whoo
I’m home; where are you? whenever we enter the house.”
To feel pity is to feel sympathetic sorrow. Pity grows in the warmth of a home and in the hot mugs of sweetened coffee. I wonder if Townsend had to wipe the condensation from her window before she “pitied the [owl],” now perched at the top of an evergreen, feeling it’s sway. But all of it is past tense, that shift so subtle and intentional it could only mark a change in perspective. The distance between “I pitied” and “I pity” is many miles, but here it’s traversed in a move as subtle as shifting your weight from your left foot to your right. The shift is a release.
One of my favorite ways to profess love is through enumeration (human fallacy to link value with growing numbers). Here is what Townsend could have said about the snow but did not:
1. A foot of snow deadened the sounds of winter
2. Snow lay over our hill like a blanket
3. The Frost performs its secret ministry,
Unhelped by any wind. The owlet’s cry
Came loud — and hark, again!
4. I think three might actually be Coleridge.
5. From the sky came a flurry of white stuff
Through the snow, the owl hears a mouse that even on the quietest day in May a human may miss under the shuffles of their own footsteps. The line celebrates the owl’s abilities, which to the owl are not magnificent. It celebrates without sentiment, giving the owl’s action a space of its own within the poem. The tether holding together owl and human is subtle and exists in the nearly imperceptible moment of a blink. But maybe, like me, she hopes that in an even smaller moment, when we reveal our eyes to the world again, we, us and the owl, see it in the same way,
Then the poem turns, “Though they are not like us at all.” But I think, somehow, we already knew that. In the same way, we know that we are imperfect translators of nature’s many voices. Finally, we see the breadth of human inadequacy in the “I’m here” of the owl, a plastering of human voice over owl, and a loss the onomatopoeia present in the first stanza.
Lyrebird mimics the kookaburra.
Magpie mimics the golden retriever.
Stellar Jay mimics the red-tail hawk.
Human mimics the owl.
The key word is mimic. Mimic does not equal meaning. The gentle “Whoo-whoo” holding no larger significance than letting your human mate know you’ve arrived. The transmutation of voice. Owl into poet. Poet into mimic.
*The rest of Allison Townsend’s poem, “Between Green Flannel Sheets Splattered with Portuguese Roses” can be found in Wildbranch: An Anthology of Nature, Environmental, and Place-based Writing.
