June 20, 2012

A scream in the night . . . as least that's what I thought it was when I heard it.  Sitting up late, after 1 am, I heard someone screaming or some loud noise and thought perhaps some neighbor was in trouble.  When I went to the back door and opened it, the screaming stopped . . . then there was a loud confused rustling in the trees, I could not tell from where, and the cry sounded again.  I realized it was a bird, and from the sound of it a large bird, and the cry it was making was like a very loud  plaintive two-toned call.  I never heard anything like it before, and it flew off, still making that enormous ululating call, sounding lost in the night, searching for home, in terror of never finding it again.  Standing on the back porch in the warm muggy night, it seemed like a voice from another world, someplace lonely and wild.

So, of course, being me, this morning I had to find out what made that sound, and though it took awhile, I discovered it was a common loon, not so common to me.  I did not realize this was part of their range, I think of them as northern cold-weather birds, not inhabiting some warm humid night on a southern bay.  We have lived here a LONG time and I never heard that call before last night, and I am often up in the night, heck, I never heard that call in the daytime either.   Though I was alarmed at first, I am glad to have heard something I never expected to hear.  I have read about them, read poems about them even, they seem to be a bird people are fascinated by, and from their call I can see why.  I love the internet where you can find so many answers, and I found that some of their calls sound like wolves baying at the moon.  The call I heard is a yodel, or that's what the experts have named it.   The only bird call I have heard that rivals it in oddness and volume is the laughing call of the pileated woodpecker.  We surely do live in a world of wonders. 

And so, today it's a poem about a loon, actually very close to my own experience, as the poet was reading in the night when she heard it as well.  Sometimes the best thing about poetry is that you recognize your own circumstances in it and know you share some experience with another human beings.  Makes you feel a little less lonely, and a little more joy to think of that sharing . . .

The Loon

Not quite four a.m., when the rapture of being alive
strikes me from sleep, and I rise
from the comfortable bed and go
to another room, where my books are lined up
in their neat and colorful rows. How
magical they are! I choose one
and open it. Soon
I have wandered in over the waves of the words
to the temple of thought.
                                            And then I hear
outside, over the actual waves, the small,
perfect voice of the loon. He is also awake,
and with his heavy head uplifted he calls out
to the fading moon, to the pink flush
swelling in the east that, soon,
will become the long, reasonable day.
                                                  Inside the house
it is still dark, except for the pool of lamplight
in which I am sitting.
                              I do not close the book.
Neither, for a long while, do I read on.

Mary Oliver

Something so alien, so haunting makes lovely poetry, doesn't it?   And who better to write it than someone who has spent her life with the wildness of nature as a daily companion.  And I like her "long, reasonable day" and her response to that weird wild call is to just sit and hear the echoes of it.  After hearing it, I went in and went to bed, lying in the dark thinking how astonishing even the most ordinary place can be.

We are going on vacation tomorrow.  We are going to see Linda and Lee Ann and to my husband's reunion, then we will see the boys and Kaci and Shawn in Oklahoma for our mostly annual July 4th visit.  We are leaving . . . very early, it's a husband thing.  So this will be the last note for awhile, until after July 7.  And then on July 10th, I will have cataract removal surgery on my right eye and it will be a few days after that I suppose before I will be back to normal enough to do the morning note.  Anything having to do with my eyes makes me nervous as I try to imagine life without being able to see what I see every morning.  It makes me nervous, in a different way, to be so long without the early morning writing, but at least when I come back I might have some new things to say.