November 14, 2012

This morning when I left early for school, there was a woodpecker making that weird laugh and then banging his head against that old oak snag for his breakfast.  The only reason I could see him is he happened to be on the side of the tree facing the driveway and making so much noise he would have been hard to miss.  That bright red on his head is like nothing else you might see in a tree.  Because the wind has blown for days now, everything is looking dry and thin.  The maple leaves particularly have been thinned almost to translucence by the wind, and they are moving more and more into the yellow range, though only the very top is gold now.  The cane, in the places where it has been cut back the most, is only putting out thin white sprigs that are not growing with the rabidness of summer, but still not giving up the fight, no matter how cold and windy it is.  We are slowly sliding back into the drought pattern with the jet stream splitting right over us so there is one north and one farther south, but nothing really to bring us much weather.  The clouds that thickened up yesterday are still here today, though they promised they would be gone around noon; that gives them an hour, more or less, to vanish, and somehow I don't think they will be on schedule.

I have been thinking about that woodpecker . . . his determination, and wondering if I would ever get breakfast if I had to bash my head in that fashion to obtain it.  Charles Wright has written a poem with a woodpecker in the title and nowhere else!  I read the poem several times and, nope, only in the title does the bird appear, other birds, but not the woodpecker.  I saw a short film on YouTube of him reading it, and he said he liked the title, thought it was humorous, and so used it.  Well, I like the poem, and the title is humorous and has that woodpecker in it, so it is the poem for today <smile>.

THE WOODPECKER PECKS,
BUT THE HOLE DOES NOT APPEAR

It's hard to imagine how unremembered we all become,
How quickly all that we've done
Is unremembered and unforgiven,
how quickly
Bog lilies and yellow clover flashlight our footfalls,
How quickly and finally the landscape subsumes us,
And everything that we are becomes what we are not.

This is not new, the orange finch
And the yellow and dun finch
picking the dry clay politely,
The grasses asleep in their green slips
Before the noon can roust them,
The sweet oblivion of the everyday
like a warm waistcoat
Over the cold and endless body of memory.

Cloud scarce Montana morning.
July, with its blue cheeks puffed out like a putto on an ancient map,
Huffing the wind down from the northwest corner of things,
Tweets on the evergreen stumps,
swallows treading the air,
The ravens hawking from tree to tree, not you, not you,
Is all that the world allows, and all one could wish for.

Charles Wright

And, yes, I know we will not be long remembered, all the ones of us living ordinary lives, we fade pretty quickly, but it was enough to have lived, to see the woodpecker, the grasses, the sky, and even the ravens.  It is enough to have that ordinary world for however long I have it, to love and to have been loved.  Those ravens do talk sometimes, calling out for notice, jeering from branch to branch, chasing the owl from sleep, and hunting for their own breakfast.  You might think the woodpecker with its determination and hard-headed business would be more admirable.  But, its the crow and the raven, the owl and the vulture that attract me.  It's the ones that see something in the shiny things of the world, who awake in the night keep me company, the ones that go about the thankless task of cleaning up the wild places for which I have such fondness.  The woodpecker's laugh means more to me than its industrious pounding <chuckle>!  The oblivion of everyday a warm waistcoat over the cold body of memory until even memory become warm with it, all one could wish for!