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...TO JOHN KEATS, POET, AT SPRING TIME by COUNTEE CULLEN WHEN HE WOULD HAVE HIS VERSES READ by ROBERT HERRICK THE STIRRUP-CUP by SIDNEY LANIER DEWEY IN MANILA BAY [MAY 1, 1898] by RICHARD VORHEES RISLEY TO ONE SHORTLY TO DIE by WALT WHITMAN THE ARGONAUTS (ARGONATUICA): MEDEA'S DREAM by APOLLONIUS RHODIUS BROTHER BENEDICT by ALFRED AUSTIN |