12 Little Aubades with Love in the Company of the Last Birds
songs for the approach of winter solstice
**** 12 Little Aubades with Love in the Company of the Last Birds Even in the wind ducks rocket off the surf into a glowing morning haze that traverses the bay just another snow squall shade crossing the water. Hold that hat and lean. * Long time love takes you through weariness when all reliable kisses fail to rescue you from the approach of our inevitable disappearance. Ah... this day’s first auburn hours—how angles of geese bark over the house! * What we want is to save each other but even that dissolves as the days speed by and great remembrances of our travels join us this morning at the back window to see the nuthatches feed * Our contract here concerns love and all the seabirds, the cranes you hear far far above us hold us to the treaty we agreed to and have somehow forgotten. You and I here at dawn—we notice this * Some days even this one it all begins again. Recall the love we bared to one another the snowy paths that silence our lack of language remind us why we can’t stay and then that snowy owl sees us *
* When do these frigid sweet seas return to endless stillness? How do mergansers stay until ice seals and shuts their world? What have we done here but made noise and oil? Look: another post-dawn blush. * I can’t abide all this waiting, this attempt to obstruct the minutes the deadly drama of momentous winds demonic weather changes, deaths of birds, numbers we don’t even remember. Still every ragged daybreak I turn to you *
* I travel beside you there are great gatherings of cranes before the ice is gone hawks drift above the dunes what miracles we witness! What mystery the first light in this storm of belonging! * We may not survive some terrible end as the collapse of the planetary architecture of hope becomes one great forgetting. We may be gone. And the children the feathered things we adore? How praise the passing of wings? * We wish to end softly we wish to pass stories to continue these starry migrations—red knots rest along the Mid Atlantic nest in Nunavut we wish beyond our going something will go on. So much stillness in the end. We may not be forgiven. *
* We might not forget or be forgotten if every time we arrive we keep moving. Each morning clear, conscious, brilliant cold after gales shake snowdrifts from the sky prepare to say goodbye even now now amid the last birds. * False dawn. Salt truck passes, moony sky fades into morning the wind that rolled and shattered waves all the way down the breakwall yesterday, gone. I clock in. White is blue blue is silver one more day ***