November 20, 2012

Usually in the very early morning, there is nothing much to see.  The sky slowly gets lighter, going through it's usually blues and pinks and sometimes purples and oranges, and the occasional bird, or squirrel, or early morning runner, maybe the cats or the neighbor's black dog.  Some days it's so quiet in the very early morning you feel like the only one awake in the world.  Once in awhile, something strange or wonderful happens.  This morning was like that, so quiet, so still when two common egrets sailed in to the yard on wide-swept wings and landed just past the maple tree.  You forget when you see them from far away just how large they are and how white!  I have seen a handful of them in the yard over the past couple of years, but I was trying to remember ever seeing two of them together, and I could only remember them in solitary splendor.  These were fluorescent white against the early dark, and I would have missed them if I hadn't happen to sit down for a moment just as they glided in.  They walked around, politely stepping around each other, their long legs and knobby knees unlikely for such elegance as they own.  One walked up to the statue I have a an egret and just stepped around it hardly giving it a glance.  Nothing else moved, even the wind did not intrude.  For a moment I lost sight of them, past the edge of the window over by the porch, perhaps they were looking in the glass door, then they walked single file like celebrants as some stately wedding down to the end of the driveway and when they reached the road, they flapped awkwardly a couple of times and sailed away again, past the house on the corner, spread wings of such whiteness, trailing long dark legs behind them.  I sat there a little sorry they did not stay longer, but grateful for getting to see both of them, a grace to bless the morning as surely as a prayer.  Maybe they were a prayer . . .

When I got home from school and went to find the poem, I remembered reading one just yesterday from poets.org about seeing egrets, and went back to find it.  It's longer than I usually send but worth it.  This lady knows what it means to see egrets . . .

Window Seat:

Providence to New York City

My sixteenth

egret from

the window

of this train,

white against

the marshes'

shocking green

cushioning

Long Island

Sound from

Kingston down

to Mystic against

the shoreline's

erratic discipline:

the egret so

completely

still, the colors

so extreme,

the window

of my train

might be rolling

out a scroll

of meticulous

ancient Chinese

painting: my heart-

beat down its side

in liquid characters:

no tenses, no

conjunctions, just

emphatic strokes

on paper from

the inner bark

of sandalwood:

egret, marshes,

the number

sixteen: white

and that essential

shocking green-

perhaps even

the character

for kingfisher

green balanced

with jade white

in ancient poems-

every other element

implicit in the

brush strokes'

elliptic fusion

of calm and motion,

assuring as my

train moves on

and marsh gives way

to warehouses

and idle factories

that my sixteen

egrets still remain:

each a crescent

moon against

an emerald sky,

alabaster on

kingfisher green,

its body motionless

on one lithe leg,

cradling its

surreptitious

wings

Jacqueline Osherow

I love how she paints her heartbeat down the edge of her canvas, and how she calls them crescent moons, they sure do look like that against the dark as well, and their surreptitious wings, because when they stand with their wings folded, you can't begin to imagine how large they are spread out on the wind and how those long legs trail like the streamers on some white kite.  I wondered what they would make of the statue, and all they made of it was . . . nothing much.  They knew it was not kin to them no matter how faithfully reproduced.  I love that it calls to mind the times I have seen egrets in the yard, and how it will stand there and let me look my fill at it, while the wild egrets you have to sort of catch on the fly, glimpse for only the moments they allow it before they vanish.  There is just something so improbable about them, the elegance and simplicity of a painting, yet they walk with their backward facing knees, and take off with their ungainly wobbling strokes until they catch the rhythm, then all ethereal powerful grace.  I love living where I can see such things right here just outside my window.