Читать книгу Doubtful Harbor - Idris Anderson - Страница 14

Three Birds in One Cypress

In a glimpse of its flying, its deep-mouth pouch,

I say pelican, but no, when it lands in the top

of the cypress, its blue-gray wings fold with grace.

A pelican never settles his elbows any way but

awkwardly. Now through binoculars, the pouch

stretches out, a neck curves up to an elegant

crown, a slip of black feather like a fashionable hat,

straight javelin beak, and directly in line with the beak

a sharp yellow eye, a brow etched like wood grains

around a small knot. A heron, I know him. A Great Blue.

I’ve seen a vulture in the same tree and, yes,

there he is, brown and black hunched down in his nasty

feathers. His naked ugly wrinkled red head, I admit,

always a pleasure to note. In sweeping the lens

to his perch, I catch yellow, then focus: a beautiful bird,

black-and-white wing stripes easy to see even when worn

like a herringbone coat, and that gold head and breast.

A hawk, for sure. I search through Peterson’s

but can’t find him. I know Diane will know

straightaway: Juvenile Northern Harrier.

Now in the gray light of early evening, a sailboat

is making its way to the harbor. Tacking north

and east into wind, it comes closer and closer,

past the island of noisy cormorants and seals.

A fog has settled over the headland. I know

I’m not there, or there where I’d been only

yesterday looking for whales, their spouts far out

but visibly there. I walked the footpaths, tried

to name the flowers. But here, here I am

looking through these wide, open windows,

finding words and names for what I can see,

looking for a glimpse of the self in ignoring it,

putting it on the other side of binoculars, making it

small, letting it drift, go to seed or to silt,

catch a current of air and be blown out to the sea,

high with a gull’s view, waiting for, no, glutting after

what the tourists have left me, needing a gyroscope.

Safe-alone in Dick’s house I could choose which bird

to look at, as long as he lasted. I chose the yellow

of the Harrier, as still as an owl until he flew.