BIRDING

Most of the time when a person suffers from pulled muscles or a back out of alignment — the signs of aging — she’s inevitably given a tube of balm along with a treatment by a physical therapist or a chiropractor, perhaps a massage specialist. The tube is a receptacle of magic bullets reputed to stem the tide of pain and aging.

Yesterday, after four or five days of treatments, including the tube of balm, for an unrelenting attack to my back and leg, I went out on the front porch and applied my personal brand of balm: watching birds splashing in a freshly-filled bird bath under the towering hemlock in my yard. Hidden away in the understory were several species that flew in for a bath and directed my attention away from ailments — nuthatches, tufted titmice, a Carolina wren, and, finally, the premier birds of my notice: both male and female cardinals. Absent from the line-up were my favorite crow friends who’ve made only sporadic appearances on the Mountain this year.

The smaller perch birds stayed busy pushing each other out of the bath while the cardinals looked on in disdain and never entered the water, but they managed to make themselves heard by their “cheer, cheer” voices from a thicket near the drive. As I watched, the cardinals would swoop out of their lair and land near the bird bath but avoided disturbing the perch birds, just as the perch birds avoided these aggressive red beauties that are confident of their territory near a tangle of blackberry bushes.

I’ve written many poems about birds — crows, cardinals, sparrows, and hawks. The hawk was a powerful figure clinging to a telephone wire on my drive to work in Lafayette, Louisiana every day for years. It hovered over the sugarcane fields, waiting for a chance to swoop down on field mice. The hawk also appeared as the totem for a character in Martin Finds His Totem, my young adult book about a boy traiteur in Cajun country. On my daily drive, the mornings that the hawk wasn’t clinging to the wire, I often felt a bit anxious, as if the day lacked a solidness I couldn’t explain.

I’m not the type of bird watcher who has a bird list, so I guess I wouldn’t be bold enough to declare myself an official bird watcher, but I’m an appreciative watcher. Birds are spiritual symbols for me — symbols of comfort, peace, freedom, and joy, especially when the body has failed to behave as it should — or maybe shouldn’t — at age 81. If I’d written a poem instead of this blog today, it would’ve been entitled “Bird Balm.”

Here’s one of my very early, descriptive bird poems that I finally published in The Holy Present and Farda. It’s entitled “Unfinished Song”:

“Twisted fingers of trees,

filagrees of ruin,

taunt the false spring.

Robins and grackles

rally for season to commence

and sparrows twit further on,

perfect intervals before the resurrection.

They mock wire-sitting blackbirds

besting a wind that trembles
like memory rustling in stunted cane.

Farther in the woods

the sun streams through

labyrinths of branches.

Vultures circle wax myrtle.

Starlings arrange themselves in waiting,

faking the downstroke,

chorus witness to a new beginning.

Sometime before dark, near water,

hawks glide overhead, sent off course

to circumvent an anxious season —

the unfinished lark.”

Photograph by Victoria I. Sullivan

 

COWS COOLING OFF

Walt Whitman wrote in A Song of Myself "I could turn and live with the animals, / they are so placid and self-contain'd, / I stand and look at them long and long / they do not sweat and whine about their condition..." Perhaps they don't whine about their condition, but they do get overheated and sweat (on their noses, of course). Lately, when we drive Templeton Way on our way to the Convent of St. Mary, we see a small herd of cows and calves bunched together, up to their bellies in a pond in the pasture where they graze. Although I'm one of those humans who's afraid of cows, dating back over seventy years, the distant sight of these bovine creatures, half immersed in pond water, becalms me.

My first experience with a cow was not a good one. I was three years old and out playing in a side yard when I spied a cow tethered to a stake in a pasture alongside our yard in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. A young boy who was probably no more than ten seemed to be tending the cow, and he kept beckoning for me to open the gate in the fence that separated our yard from the pasture. Since my older brother only gave me attention when his six-year old playmates were away, it was one of those desultory days in hottest summer when I had no one to keep me company and nothing to do but poke a stick around in every hole I could find in the yard. So when I saw that finger beckon me, I ran to the fence and placed my hand on the latch of the gate. My mother, who had been watching from the kitchen window, flew out of the house, screaming at me: "Don't go near that cow!"

The cow looked innocuous enough to me, but I was unfamiliar to her, and my mother was probably wise in alerting me to the danger. When I screamed back that I was going anyway, my mother slapped me for the first and last time I can remember experiencing corporal punishment from her during my childhood. The slap and the admonition not to go near the cow have stuck in my mind as a dangerous experience. Later, when I'd visit my grandmother during the summer and often walked up 10th Avenue to visit my aunt, I'd walk as close to the street as I could to avoid an old cow staked out in an unfenced vacant lot near the sidewalk.

So I've never been near a cow, but I like to view them from a distance because they engender a feeling of pastoral peace. After all, they've been around as domestic animals for over 10,000 years and there are one billion of them alive and doing well. Those bovines clinging to one another in the pond at Sewanee create that peaceful feeling in me, and we took pictures of them yesterday—but from a distance and at a vantage point behind a barbed wire fence.

When I lived in Iran, I often saw a cow anchored in a desert lot near the Ahwaz Super Grocery and kept my distance from the poor animal who had no pond to dip into to cool off. I wrote a poem about my exposure to this creature in a long poem entitled "A Girl and A Cow," which appeared in my book of poetry about Iran, The Holy Present and Farda:

"She guards the stringy tan cow
not even a 'friendly cow all red and white,'
its neck encircled by thin rope
like a frayed shoelace tied loosely
to one stick anchored in sandy soil,
nibbling parched summer grass—
short stubs in a vacant lot
staked out for future houses—
the coming of more expatriates,
new neighbors in Melli Rah.

Dressed in knee length overblouse,
blue cotton buttoned at the neck,
matching pants,
and head covering of same blue cotton,
she is an outfit without a life,
looking longingly at Ahwaz Super
just a leap across the concrete djube,
near enough to offer its wares,
far enough for one who has no rials,
wishing for a break from the all-day vigil,
guarding a cow without milk,
an animal not likely to be eaten,
the girl surely wondering why,
why she must encourage its chewing,
tend it in 110-degree desert heat.

She stands there, unspeaking,
ignoring us,
knows little of Anglos,
people in Melli Rah
who live on the springs of oil,
no more bothersome to her
than the blazing sun.
But my blond-haired teen-age daughter,
cycling to the Ahwaz Super,
worries that a girl her age
tends a cow in the hot sun,
asks me to buy her chocolate bars,
fetch her a parasol from the bazaar
to ward off the sun, unrelenting...
the cultural disparity, scorching.

Photograph by Victoria I. Sullivan

A BOX IN THE MAIL

Diane, Paul, Sidney Sue:
Christmas early 1940's

Two weeks ago my older brother Paul died in a nursing home on the rugged northern coast of California. His wife had moved to Big Bear City in southern California just a few weeks before Christmas and had sent me a box of notebooks filled with photographs of all his paintings and the beautiful gardens he had created in his yard.

His life passed before me, and my grief is deeper than sentiment, blood thicker than all the sins he buried in the garden he made for his wife, colors made bolder in a place where he could not hide his soul. "The place" dead-ended in a small wood and was surrounded by a tall cedar fence. Several small bungalows flanked a stone and cedar house with a square bay window in front. Flowers covered every space in the yard—yellow nasturtiums, red salvia, petunias, hollyhock—blossoms hovering over stones and settled among small pieces of driftwood. Birdbaths nestled in clumps of elephant ears and fern; begonias in
wooden tubs. It was a place of nooks and wooden bridges, and at the farthermost point of the yard, a forest of cedars and redwoods loomed.

The first time I visited him in this paradisiacal setting, he told me: "This is life here." That  life followed years of profligate behavior, and he had created a habitat that reflected only aesthetic intention. His paintings hung everywhere—landscapes of California or Louisiana, and a  
group of abstracts that looked like the beginning of creation, cosmic explosions in brilliant reds and blacks.

Ineffably, part of him will go down into the soil that nourished his plants; the rest will ride the wild, blue waves of the Pacific that he was always painting. And I have the photographs in the notebook and the covers of most of my poetry books for which he rendered beautiful paintings—valuable keepsakes that reflect a kind of artistic endurance.

Requiescat in pace, Paul.XXX

SMALL PLEASURES

My version of "when all else fails, do this..." has altered during the past few years. I was once inclined to say that "when all else fails, take a hot bath," but lately I've changed that sentence to read: "When all else fails, plant a garden," or "stroll through a garden" because I believe that flowers/plants have healing and soothing effects on humans.

Here on the Cumberland Plateau at Sewanee where I spend spring and summer, we have a small garden that would probably seem negligible as far as gardens grow, but it satisfies my sense of aesthetics and is a soothing sight every morning when I open the back door. Only this morning, I opened it and spied a red knockout rose blooming against the grey planks of the back fence. Of course, I have a black thumb and could describe my gardening expertise as much like that to which Ogden Nash laid claim: the skills of a "horticultural ignoramus." However, I do appreciate gardens as avenues for feeding the soul.

When I lived on the desert plains of Khuzestan in Iran for two years, I had a small rose garden, and the first book of poetry by a Persian writer that I bought was the Gulestan (The Rose Garden) by Sa'Di, who wrote:

"Of what use will a dish of roses be to thee?

Take a leaf from my rose garden.

A flower endures but five or six days

But the rose garden is always delightful."

Sa'Di also said that if he had only two loaves of bread, he'd sell one and buy hyacinths because they would feed his soul. Persians love gardens, and during the 1970's when I lived in Ahwaz, Iran, lush gardens enclosed by mud walls were scattered throughout the city of a half million inhabitants. Readers can imagine the vegetation that flourished in Iran by reading a long poem I wrote for The Holy Present and Farda, published in 2009, thirty-four years following my sojourn in this mid-eastern country:

KHUZESTAN COLOR

Touching down on flat Iranian plains,

the aircraft enters another West Texas,

a stark landscape of stone and sand.

"Where did all the flowers go?"

the tune replays in my mind

but it is a fleeting thing

this question about landscape,

some weeks later I have seen

lale', the wild tulip

growing spiritedly at Masjid-I-Suleiman,

blooms of beauty taken to Europe

during the Crusades

and wild garlic with red and green flowers

clustering in flower stalls.

Goats have stripped the stark plateau,

leaving only globe and artichoke thistle,

a few anemones and yellow daisies.

They have bypassed the caper plant,

spicy night bloomer,

its large white flowers wilting in sunlight,

at night its pickled buds

enhancing salads at dinner parties.

Plants within our reach,

wild marigolds at Andimeshk

near Choga Mish,

and farther into the Zagros Mountains

at Hamadan, Iran's red poppy,

closer home, cultivated gardens

of Persian cyclamen

showing off her heart-shaped base.

In my own garden

the yellow rose of Texas struggles

and is the household joke,

that I was lured to Iran by a spouse

who sang at my arrival,

"I didn't promise you a rose garden,"

then grew a neat row

of yellow and pink blooms.

We do not neglect the almond and pistachio

or the tall Lombard poplars favoring Isfahan,

nor can we forget the poisonous oleander,

nemesis of Ahwaz gardeners,

a plant that gave me a case of hayfever

endemic to more tropical climes,

reminding me of home,

Teche country—without walls—

but the same lushness enclosing.

The photograph at the top of this blog is a shot of the miniature garden in my backyard, a space where plants nod good morning every day and speak to my condition "when all else fails."