Signs of Life
Feb 26 2015


Birds swarm the feeder
like schooling fish,
swoop, dart, flick

but never touch.

How uncanny, this synchronous dance,

choreographed
by some 6th sense,
gaudy scales flashing
blacksilverblack.

But the birds are dark, the snow marred
by discarded seeds.
And not the soundless precision of fish
but a scolding cacophony
of squawks and tweets.
And then, some alarm sensed
off, in all directions
in a flutter of wings.

Disciplined fish

held by water's weight
electric salt.
While in the lightness of air
birds come apart.

Would they have over-wintered
in this bitter cold

all alone,

no one stoking the feeder
for signs of life?
For swirling flight, when all is still,
furious chirping
bantam-weight will?

We come together, in collective effort
then disperse;
we, to feather beds, in the balm of night,

and birds, to their furtive shelter
in deathly quiet.

Until first light,
when all as one
they once again take flight.

Except on a bare branch
in some dormant tree

a darkening.

Wild things

perish quietly

in the merciful cold,

unheard, unseen.

A frozen bird

undisturbed 'til spring.

My neighbours have a giant feeder in their yard, and the birds literally swarm it. They fly in tight formation, for a few seconds swooping in shimmering sheets like schools of fish, only to disintegrate into squabbling squawking chaos. The dog gives chase -- not that she'll ever catch one, or know what to do if she does! -- and their formation breaks as they flee.

She'll also catch sight of a squirrel, who occasionally emerge from their semi-hibernation to scavenge fallen seeds. He levitates across the top of the snow; she porpoises through it: doggedly determined, but destined to fail. Then he scoots up a tree, leaving her confused as to where he vanished. This poem was going to be another dog poem, and begin with the fleetness of a squirrel across the snow. But I kept seeing the birds. And aside from that, I'm always grateful not to write another self-indulgent celebration of dogs.

The argument against bird feeders is that it makes them dependent. You have a moral obligation to continue, once you start. There is also an argument that you might be disrupting natural migration patterns. Or that you might be confounding evolution, helping the weak links survive and thus diluting the gene pool. But birds in winter are an ornament: welcome signs of life, with their movement and song. Anyway, as little as I know about birds (which is very little indeed!) I think these are mostly hardy little chickadees, which would over-winter with or without our help.

I've written before about animals dying in the wild. There is something about the stoicism of their end I greatly admire: an injured animal, dragging itself off deeper into the bush and quietly licking its wounds. There is the fatalism, the toughness, the persisting instinct for self-preservation; then the stoic surrender to death. We rarely see the dead bodies of wild animals: they're either quickly scavenged, or discreetly decompose.

I like the misdirection of the title: a poem called Signs of Life that ends in the exact opposite.

I like the elegant solution of blacksilverblack. I tried it the other way around (silverblacksilver), as well as with hyphens and slashes and separately. But the italics and compression capture the speed, while at the same time conforming best to the line's natural rhythm.

I like the rhyming of the last stanza: from merciful, through bird, unheard, to undisturbed. It works, but I hope without the reader seeing the gears moving, and without sounding overly stylized or shoe-horned-in.

There is a push-pull between the collective and the individual running through the poem: how the birds are like a school of fish that then disintegrates into each-for-himself; how we work together to keep them fed, then disperse after dark. We favour them as signs of life. But inevitably, some won't survive the winter night, when they're on their own.

These small birds live on the margins of survival. In their profusion, we never notice the ones who don't make it. I imagine a frozen bird, untouched until spring.