GRACKLES AT LUNCH

Waiting for crumbs to drop

A few weeks ago while we sat on the patio at Rembrandt’s Café in Chattanooga, Tennessee eating a late lunch, two grackles joined us – bold birds that settled on tables and ate from plates holding half-eaten rolls and other baked goods like blueberry muffins and crème-filled pastries.

Now, I’m in a minority of people who like ravens, blackbirds, crows, and grackles because most people regard them as public nuisances. I got my first glimpse of grackles in Texas en route to Mexico when I awakened one morning to the sound of loud screeching noises that some bird enthusiasts describe as “rusty hinges squeaking.” I ran outside and sighted a gaggle of these iridescent birds a friend identified as boat tail grackles. When we passed into interior Mexico, I searched for them, finding wonderful specimens on the grounds of a small motel in Victoria, Mexico. To me, the sound of grackles squeaking was a comforting noise like friendly voices in unknown territory.

For seven years, I got my “satisfied” sighting grackles in Austin, Texas where I traveled to serve on the Board of Trustees of the Episcopal Seminary of the Southwest – they paraded on the grounds of the Holiday Inn Express in large numbers, and most guests complained about their harsh cries. While there, I read several newspaper articles denouncing boat tail grackles as public nuisances. Later, I learned that these grackles nest in southwestern Louisiana, but I’ve never sighted one around my home in bayou country.

The birds I welcomed to my table the other day were common grackles who were trying to steal food from other birds, and I learned that they often snatch food from the beak of another bird, rushing forward to grab a morsel, quickly pecking it into digestible pieces. Research reveals that “anting” is a curious practice of the common grackle in which the bird rubs captured insects on its feathers to apply the liquid from the squashed bug (formic acid). To attract a mate? To polish the iridescent sheen of their coat?

Most outdoor diners who dislike grackles don’t know that large groups of them are known as “plagues,” a term with which they’d promptly agree. Farmers also have low regard for grackles because the birds are fond of grain and flock in large numbers to gather significant quantities of this crop.

Still, I threw my roll to a large grackle as I left the café, and he squeaked his appreciation for my charitable act. And as if I don’t have enough crow, blackbird, and raven poems, I went home to write “Grackles at Lunch:”

GRACKLES AT LUNCH

Grackle above flag

pause, dip their dark bills

into hard rolls left on our plates,

rolling yellow button eyes

at our wastefulness,

but we feed the poor,

an old injunction,

although those at other tables

ignore these commissions,

call the foragers thieves,

not beggars –

bad raps for sociable creatures

who remind me of Iran’s khalag birds,

strutting waiters in black aprons

clearing tables of nahn crumbs,

leaving behind empty Tuborg bottles

and wadded paper napkins,

imitating the notes of nightingales

and casting shadows like hawk-nosed Shahs

on a blue mosaic –

the fallen kingdoms of Persia.

WEATHER MATTERS…

If you’re sitting in a doctor’s waiting room, the wait becomes more bearable when strangers strike up a conversation with you. If you live in a small town in Tennessee, you’re more likely to get into some serious talking in a doctor’s office than you would if you lived in a large city in the East. Last week, I scheduled three lab tests on three different days in Monteagle, Tennessee and spent a lot of my week sitting on uncomfortable chairs waiting for my name to be called so I could undergo what I call “Dachau experiments.” However, I was entertained in several waiting rooms by native Tennesseans talking about their favorite subject: the weather.

In one doctor’s office, I had just settled in my chair when a woman asked me if I spelled my name with one “n” or two. She had heard the nurse call my name and figured out an entrée into a parley with me. She was a naturally garrulous woman, probably in her early 70’s, who had a list of ailments and troubles as long as one of my sermons, but she delivered them cheerfully, then turned to the subject of weather.

Blackberry flowers

“We’re fixing to have a blackberry winter,” she said. “The blackberry bushes in my backyard are blooming.”

“Never heard of it,” I told her. “Seems like we’ve had enough winter up here already.”

“It’s a cold snap that happens in late spring when blackberries are blooming,” she said. “But you got to be careful if you go blackberry picking because the snakes is out. I seen four king snakes and two copperheads already.”

“Then you won’t see me doing any picking,” I told her. “We just call blackberry winters ‘freak cold snaps’ back home in Louisiana. “The weather there is pretty hospitable right now – it’s summer in Cajun country.”

“Well, up here we have blackberry winters, locust winters, redbud winters, and dogwood winters. Old folks didn’t have calendars like we do and they just relied on nature to tell them things. We had a dogwood winter in early May last winter, right about the time the dogwood started blooming. Farmers know it isn’t a good idea to plant until after those dogwoods bloom.”

Dogwood flowers

“Never heard of any of these winters. Of course, we only have about two months of real winter down where I live – December and January. Maybe February.”

“We got another name for a cold spell in the spring,” she interrupted. “It’s called Linsey-Woolsey Britches Winter – it means that when the cold spell finishes, you can put away your long johns ” (as if I wore them).

I forgot about this conversation until I checked the temperature gauge on the front porch yesterday morning and saw that temps had dipped to 59 degrees. The high for the day was 67 degrees. When I checked the weather report online, I read that the low temperature predicted for last night was 46 degrees, and when I got up 7 a.m., the temp was 56 degrees!  These temps couldn’t be called wintry, but the weather is certainly brisk this morning. My new friend had been right on the money!

I didn’t tell this new friend that two months ago I wrote a poem entitled “Too Much Gray in the Day,” a wry bit of verse about returning to the gray weather of Sewanee in still-cold March. She seemed fairly acclimated to the somber winters here on The Mountain and even welcomed a blackberry winter.

The poem will be published in a new book of poetry I’m working on during this blackberry winter:

TOO MUCH GRAY IN THE DAY

Seventy years passed

before I figured out weather matters.

I had to move away from humid air

caught in the branches of old oaks

overhanging rusty bayou water,

climb 2,000 feet to find another home

where the dry air of the Cumberland

and ice in March

convinced me weather matters

in the sum mood of things;

a perpetual gray mist

can stupefy, cause you to slip

backwards into a metaphysical trance,

court oblivion or to consider

the end of the world,

hurl yourself over a barren cliff;

fall into the chasm of depression

just because the snow won’t melt,

and the March sun is white light;

the energy you thought was stored up

for a long winter’s day

is topped out, disappeared into

an eternity of wind,

telephone wires humming with frost,

snow in the bird bath.

I put on socks, turn up the volume

of Mozart’s Sonatas in A and D,

hoping the musical vibrations,

even at low volume,

will cause a seasonal change,

make the thermometer rise.

Using a long wooden spoon

I stir a pot of lentil soup,

making a grandmother kitchen,

steaming up the double glass windows,

consider calling everyone I know

back home on the bayou

where a south wind

blows over the slow-moving stream,

a perfect arrangement of essential warmth,

good to think about

when you’re too far from the equator,

too old to consider ice skating

or a cruise to Alaska,

or to appreciate the melancholy clouds

drifting across the wintry sun…

a bristling wolf pacing outside.

PINYON REVIEW #3

Literary journals have been around for a long time; the oldest being the North American Review, and the oldest continuous one being the Yale Review.  Here at Sewanee, literati take pride in the Sewanee Review which was established in 1892.  Today there are the “ezines,” or online journals, which include prestigious publications like Evergreen Review, Story South, Unlikely Stories, and numerous other journals online that are eyed askance by the print publications but which contain arresting stories, poems, and articles.

A newcomer on the literary journal scene is one that I’ve mentioned in previous blogs – the Pinyon Review, a journal published in Montrose, Colorado by Editor Gary Lee Entsminger and Managing Editor, Susan Elliott.  The May issue of this journal just arrived in my post office box yesterday, and like any poet hungry for publication, I searched for my poem “In Memory of Mint,” which is included in the journal.

As I’m a Louisiana native and also live in what I call "misty, moisty Sewanee" part of the year, my eyes were drawn to the cover photograph of a spring blizzard by Rob Walton that was more reminiscent of foggy mornings in both locales and of the 19^th century Louisiana artist, Drysdale, and his famous misty landscapes.

Poetry comprises a large part of the Pinyon Review, and among the well-known poets featured is Dabney Stuart, whom Gary describes as a “master of the English language and highly acclaimed poet,” the author of 17 volumes of poetry, most recently Pinyon Publishing’s Greenbrier Forest.  Three of Stuart’s poems are included, but the minimalist poem, “Times’s Body” particularly resonated with me:

The skybell

with neither clapper nor dome

rings.

Air draws

words into its passing,

nothing in some other

guise, time’s

body

Snow fills the bell,

gathers into its tolling,

falls.

Stuart’s collection of poems for young readers that inspire wonder about the animal world was published by Pinyon in 2010 in a volume entitled Open the Gates and included enchanting paintings of porpoises, lemurs, doves, water buffalos, and other animals rendered by Susan Elliott.

Gary and Susan treat us to the first chapter of the Fall of ’33, “Turtle,” in this issue of the journal, alluding to “something happened that changed everything,” a chapter which should titillate readers to order the book and discover the happening that changed everything in a family in the Virginia Blue Ridge Mountains during a train ride west – a story that includes Indian and mystical ancestry in Virginia, dating back to Shakespeare’s time and even earlier.

Julia K. Walton, a newcomer to the journal, wows readers with her textile artwork, incorporating repurposed fabrics.  Walton creates patchwork, appliqués, collages, rag rugs, and acrylic paintings, drawing her ideas from nature and colors natural to the environment.  Her set of Nine Green Britain and 1 Austerity Britain of flags comprising patchwork quilts with cotton and cotton mix textiles is an arresting picture among three “Fire Horse Textiles” photographs in Pinyon Review #3.

Another art chapter entitled “Watercolor Baskets” by Mary Moran Miller presents interesting colors and forms in baskets made of heavy watercolor paper.  The paper is painted, cut into strips for weaving, and made into baskets.  I was attracted to “Harlo, 2011,” a basket 18”x4”x2” in different shades of blue and formed in a conical shape, an interesting vessel that Miller describes as “holding my ideas.” 

A friend and academician laughed aloud when she read Richard Cecil’s poem entitled “Faculty Annual Report”:

Honors: None Grants and Awards: Zero.

Course Development: Taught the same way

as always for exactly the same pay.

Conferences—attended/session leader: No.

Professional Activities.  Trudged through snow

to school in January, through rain in May.

Publications (novels, stories, essays):

Poems in small journals (see below).

Volunteer Activities: None.

When I did work, I didn’t work for free;

in unpaid time, I loafed or else had fun.

Service in the University:

Attended pointless meetings of committees.

Attended pointless meetings of committees.

These are just a few of the contributions in the third issue of Pinyon Review, another significant collection of literature and artwork published in a small cabin in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado -- a journal of “diverse styles and techniques,” as publisher Gary Entsminger describes the latest edition of his literary publication that celebrates the arts and sciences.