Susan Glass

I've been a listener to bird song since the age of 4, and perhaps even earlier.

A first memory: I woke on a summer morning in Detroit Michigan, where from my bedroom, I heard crows scuffling and cackling and cawing in the garden outside my window. Their voices made the yard echo, and I realized there was space out there, and that the crows were voicing that space for me, adding a new dimension to my blind world.

Another early memory: Lake Erie, Monroe Michigan, and dawn. Liquid warbling that sounded like water on stream stones, and high pitched, ceramic wind chimes. The source? A flock of Purple Martins, which are a type of swallow. Their singing defined space, distance, and height, and blended with the crinkling sound of shells caught by tiny waves lapping on our beach, to create my personal Lake Erie picture. I was too young to know their proper name, but not too young to know that I loved them.

I carried this bird love with me to California where I've now spent more than 90 percent of my life. Our birds are harbingers of everything for me, of good times and bad. If the Golden Crowned Sparrows arrive later than usual in October, I get nervous. I worry that global warming is detaining them in Alaska, and that they may be stranded there by subsequent snow storms. I sicken when I read that night flying geese and ducks are slamming by the thousands into cell towers, and all it would take to stop this carnage would be to change the continuous light emanating from the towers, to flashing lights. I love how birds enlarge my world, connecting me with far flung geographies and consequences of human endeavor.

For some time now, I've been expressing my love of birds through poetry. I recently finished writing a short poetry book called Listening Blind to a Bewicks Wren, which will be published in 2019 by Slate Roof Press, a book collaborative in western Massachusetts. Slate Roof plans to release audio, braille, and print versions of the book.

Here is the title poem. It is based on the song of one of our friendliest California garden birds.

A Bewick's Wren is singing in a sky space
just beyond my patio.
I slide open the French window,
step into delicious cold,
and know this is where I'll drink the day's first coffee.

His melody is symmetrical, practiced.
"Lalalalala seeee bert,"
he lilts from an oleander bush,
rests three measures, then,
"Lalalalalala seebert."
His tail must be conducting,
a black barred, white tipped baton
curved over his back and flicking side to side.
Does the tail drive his music,
or the music, his tail?

He solos,
I sip,
Listen for a rival's dueling song.
There's none.

Halfway through my steaming cup,
he changes tunes:
"Ta tee tee teeteetee,"
As though juggling mistletoe berries till their speed becomes a trill:
"Ta tee tee teeteetee."
The trill bounces through toyon shrubs
so that I must turn my head to follow it.
"Chah! Chah chah chah!
His scolding?
His wife's?
Chah! Chah! Zzzzz!
His calls pounce in a tangle of leaves and twigs.
I imagine his upward curving bill snatching a beetle,
swallowing it whole
then borrowing a sycamore leaf for his napkin.

Silence,
And now, from much farther off,
"Swee, Swehe, Swee."
The same wren, or another?

In my next life,
I want to be his bold white eyebrows and his ventriloquism,
claiming the morning.