As a child, fresh out of the hospital with tape covering the left side of my face, I began to count birds. At age fifty the sum total is precise and astonishing, my only secret. Some men count women or the cars they've owned, their shirts -- long sleeved and short sleeved -- or shoes, but I have my birds, excluding, of course, those extraordinary days: the twenty-one thousand snow geese and sandhill cranes at Bosque del Apache; the sky blinded by great frigate birds in the Pacific off Anconcito, Ecuador; the twenty-one thousand pink flamingos in Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania; the vast flock of seabirds on the Seri coast of the Sea of Cortez down in Sonora that left at nightfall, then reappeared, resuming their exact positions at dawn; the one thousand cliff swallows nesting in the sand cliffs of Pyramid Point, their small round burrows like eyes, really the souls of the Anasazi who flew here a thousand years ago to wait the coming of the Manitou. And then there were the usual, almost deadly birds of the soul -- the crow with silver harness I rode one night as if she were a black, feathered angel; the birds I became to escape unfortunate circumstances -- how the skin ached as the feathers shot out toward light; the thousand birds the dogs helped me shoot to become a bird (grouse, woodcock, duck, dove, snipe, pheasant, prairie chicken, etc.). On my deathbed I'll write this secret number on a slip of paper and pass it to my wife and two daughters. It will be a hot evening in late June and they might be glancing out the window at the thunderstorm's approach from the west. Looking past their eyes and a dead fly on the window screen I'll wonder if there's a bird waiting for me in the onrushing clouds. @3O birds@1, I'll sing to myself, @3you've carried me along on this bloody voyage, carry me now into that cloud, into the marvel of this final night@1. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...SPOON RIVER ANTHOLOGY: MANY SOLDIERS by EDGAR LEE MASTERS THEY SAY - . by JEAN STARR UNTERMEYER WINTRY WEATHER by DAVID GRAY (1838-1861) MAUDE CLARE by CHRISTINA GEORGINA ROSSETTI INTO THE TWILIGHT by WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS COSMIC BLESSINGS by SISTER BENEDICTION |