Category: Birds

Cleaning Birdhouse

~ Kat Couch ~ Leave a comment

We are always children, really.
Every animal death is the death of love —
not dependent love,
not mom or dad, however deep,
but the first one we knew ourselves
separate and complete,
that made us separate and complete,
and so in an awful unexpected way
the death of us.

The schoolyard girl, the girl with the bangs,
the unborn twin, the boy down the block,
the collie at Christmas.
No one loved for us, none loved as we did.

The day after I put it up
house wrens built their nest
in the new birdbox,
ferrying sweetgrass and sprigs of sumac
through a hole in the neat shiplap.

It was a fine bright thing:
white pine and brass catches,
one wall and the roof hinged at the top
for cleaning out.

But at the end of summer,
cleaning it out, I stopped,
grabbed the shovel from the shed,
dug a foot-deep pit on the ridge,
above the cottonwood and the creek,
and buried the old nest there.

I drove to town in my middle age
with a well, a wound in my throat,
an organ of need, twig, and skin
wanting all of it again,
the gaping breath and the whole bone,
sure that I could not be,
after all, just a part of this.

That by now I must be hardened off,
complete as flight,
not running edgeless
into the rest of the world,

and not undone by the fledgling
left dead in the nest
his perfect unwrapped
new-brown feathers
a miniature of grief.

Strange Birds

~ Kat Couch ~ 1 Comment

In the summer we sat out by the reservoir
and watched the water shrink.
The city sent us notices
about leafy spurge and spotted knapweed.

Sometimes we mowed lawn,
picked apples, Elberta peaches;
canned some, saw the rest rot,
the grass to our knees, the driveway clear.

Hummingbirds stopped by —
and jays, cowbirds, and robins —
so many even I, fifty years, tired of them,

remembered the old Indian
who taught me to bury birds
so I could dig them up
stripped of feather and skin
and learn their bones.

But not a word about the season

how when the cold came
they had all moved on,
and now, just the prints
of deer and foxes in the snow.

So starting out this morning
I disturbed you shaking in a branch
and only heard the sound that you made leaving.
Something I had never heard before:

a cry the snow the pines.

Courtship Dive

~ Kat Couch ~ 1 Comment

A broad-tailed hummingbird,
the one with the green back and the scarlet throat,
flies between two pines
at opposite sides of the lot,
pauses out of reach,
pivots in place,
first to the left: here’s my throat,
then to the right: here’s my tail,
pivoting left, and then to the right,
all the time whirring
around an invisible pin.

And then, of course, there is no pin.
That also was a mirage,
sound faking form:
a fiddle string vibrating so hard
it loses itself.

In the near dark
when the deer come out
he soars sixty feet into the air,
turns hard to ground
in a suicide dive
from which he must pull out,
but who could see it?

She can see it, a friend told me once,
down low in the lilacs —
sees him resurface
high in his inverted world,
where gemstones drop loose from the clouds
and lightning races into the sky
from the loving earth.

Os Pavões Brancos

~ Kat Couch

Porque os pavões brancos
na Avenida Pinheiros
sente-se em gaiolas de arame ao lado dos estábulos
eu comparo os seus corpos
a lótus que crescem na lama,
ou para uma cabeça de fósforo
iluminado na escuridão.

Nem sempre foi assim:
durante meses, mal conseguimos vê-los
entre as caudas de cor creme
dos cavalos em miniatura
e só sabíamos que eles estavam lá
porque um sinal em uma poste de cerca
disse “pavões adultos à venda”.

Mas agora,
mesmo aos domingos brilhantes,
eles estouram contra a lama
como faíscas de soldadores
e eu fico acordado, vendo-os
drapeados no nosso corrimão de cedro húmido,
o fardo de beleza deles
como um buraco
perfurado no céu.

White Peacocks

~ Kat Couch ~ 1 Comment

Because the white peacocks
on Lodgepole Drive
sit in wire cages next to the stables
I compare their bodies
to lotuses that grow in the mud,
or to a matchhead
lit in the darkness.

It wasn’t always that way:
for months we could barely pick them out
among the cream-colored tails
of the miniature horses
and only knew they were there
because a sign on a fencepost
said “adult peacocks for sale”.

But now,
even on bright Sundays,
they sputter against the mud
like welders’ sparks
and I lie awake, seeing them
draped on our damp cedar railing,
the burden of their beauty
like a hole
punched in the sky.

The Gulls on Alcatraz

~ Kat Couch ~ 1 Comment

They’ll eat anything,
the Western Gulls on Alcatraz,
so sometimes you can find
on the rocks at the base of the island,
or on the cracked and splintered yard
where the cons worked out,
tennis balls and bright yellow golf balls
the birds brought over and dropped,
thinking they were mussels or oysters,
some kind of unfamiliar shellfish
the fall would break,
and not the crap we lose or toss out,
all things finding their way
to the sea as they do.

And I understand their confusion
when the balls hit the ground and bounce
high in the air, intact and inedible:

I also have made it this far,
tired from looking,
the junk of another world in my jaws,

and I also recover,
beat away again across the flat bay,
sure that tomorrow,
on this same slipshod ground,
out of the deep cerulean blue,
a bird will land,
the moon in his mouth
and his whole head
shot through with light.