Winter's Nests

First, Emily Dickinson's Poem 143:

For every Bird a Nest --
Wherefore in timid quest
Some little Wren goes seeking round --

Wherefore when boughs are free --
Households in every tree --
Pilgrim be found?

Perhaps a home too high --
Ah Aristocracy!
The little Wren desires --

Perhaps of twig so fine --
Of twine e'en superfine,
Her pride aspires --

The Lark is not ashamed
To build upon the ground
Her modest house --

Yet who of all the throng
Dancing around the sun
Does so rejoice?

Then Robert Frost's poem "The Exposed Nest":

You were forever finding some new play.
So when I saw you down on hands and knees
I the meadow, busy with the new-cut hay,
Trying, I thought, to set it up on end,
I went to show you how to make it stay,
If that was your idea, against the breeze,
And, if you asked me, even help pretend
To make it root again and grow afresh.
But 'twas no make-believe with you today,
Nor was the grass itself your real concern,
Though I found your hand full of wilted fern,
Steel-bright June-grass, and blackening heads of clovers.
'Twas a nest full of young birds on the ground
The cutter-bar had just gone champing over
(Miraculously without tasking flesh)
And left defenseless to the heat and light.
You wanted to restore them to their right
Of something interposed between their sight
And too much world at once--could means be found.
The way the nest-full every time we stirred
Stood up to us as to a mother-bird
Whose coming home has been too long deferred,
Made me ask would the mother-bird return
And care for them in such a change of scene
And might out meddling make her more afraid.
That was a thing we could not wait to learn.
We saw the risk we took in doing good,
But dared not spare to do the best we could
Though harm should come of it; so built the screen
You had begun, and gave them back their shade.
All this to prove we cared. Why is there then
No more to tell? We turned to other things.
I haven't any memory--have you?--
Of ever coming to the place again
To see if the birds lived the first night through,
And so at last to learn to use their wings.

Then today's wintry haiku:

This nest is perfect.
How can it be so naked?
Now it's so exposed.


1/2/12

The Belle of Amherst

Today is Emily Dickinson's birthday. She was born in 1830. I'm particularly struck by these two paragraphs in today's Writers' Almanac:

Over the years, scholars have done a lot of speculating about Dickinson, coming up with all sorts of theories. Last year, a biographer named Lyndall Gordon suggested that Dickinson was epileptic, and that her epilepsy explained her seclusion, the rhythm and content of her poetry, and even her famous white dress, which according to Gordon was white for sanitary reasons. Various critics have tried to prove that her seclusion was the result of a broken heart, and have offered up any number of men in her life as the possible heartbreaker. A few years ago, a scholar named Carol Damon Andrews published an article claiming that Dickinson was engaged to her brother's friend George Gould, but that her father broke it up because Gould was too poor, and that Dickinson's love poems are written to Gould. There is also the popular theory that she was a closeted lesbian, possibly in love with her sister-in-law, Susan. Other scholars have diagnosed Dickinson with SAD, seasonal affective disorder.

Many people think that there is no one answer for Dickinson's seclusion — but that above all, she was driven by a fierce desire to write poetry, and she chose to sacrifice everything else for that. Allen Tate said: "All pity for Miss Dickinson's 'starved life' is misdirected. Her life was one of the richest and deepest ever lived on this continent."

One of the richest and deepest ever lived on this continent. How about that as something to aspire to?

Hope

Melodious Blackbird

I sat under the flowering tree with a cold beer bottle in my hand, and to my surprise, I saw a bird on the ground near the wall. It was unable to fly. When I approached it, it flapped its right wing awkwardly, and fell pathetically and defenselessly on its side. Then it tried desperately to scramble away from me. It wasn’t able to. It’s wing was broken. It had a greenish tint to its ruffled neck and was otherwise plain brown. I don’t know what kind of bird it was. I imagined because its body was so ordinary that it was one of those birds with a beautiful, heartrending song. I left it alone, hoping that maybe it would regain its strength, or it would be rescued by its mother, or it would somehow fly away. I hoped that the neighborhood dogs wouldn’t find it. Or the cats or the lizards or crabs. I would keep an eye on it. I wouldn’t let anything bad happen to it.
I wondered whether it had fallen from its nest in the wind or had been hit by a swaying branch in mid flight. I wondered about hope. “Hope is the thing with feathers, that perches in the soul, and sings the tune without words, and never stops at all.” I fell asleep in the heat in my white plastic chair. I don’t know how long I slept.
Some time later, I saw that the bird had died. It lay on the sand. It didn’t move when I touched it. It was still warm, soft, almost weightless, shiny and motionless not far from where I first saw it. I buried it in my yard. It didn’t need a very big hole.
I wondered what this meant, if this inexplicable, silent death and burial might be a coded message of some kind. But I had no idea what it could mean or who would have sent it or if it were addressed to me. I didn’t think any more about the poem.

from a novel in progress