Right now at the lake the ducks and loons are hanging around boldly for a while, before the boats start up for the season and drive the loons, at least, farther away.
There's a splendid new book, "The Poets Guide to the Birds," edited by Judith Kitchen and Ted Kooser, full of poems with birds in them.
Here's a short poem from that book:
A Night With No Moon
On a night with no moon
we saw the elemental
shapes of things, or if not
the shapes, their suggestions.
Everything that lined the creek
and everything that was carried
along in it, or held fast--
like those island clumps
of weeds and the upturned
shopping cart -- gave way
to imagination. And the duck
circling under the far bridge:
we stood at the railing
of our own bridge,
and I wanted to ask you how it is
that a duck gliding in the dark
is a quieter thing than if there were
no duck at all.
-- Nancy Geyer
The poem is a koan. The technique of asking such questions is a favorite in the Zen tradition (What is the sound of one hand clapping?), designed to drive the thinking mind out of itself in order to see things differently.
This is what a good poem wants to do. It doesn't give us what we expect, but we recognize that whatever strange place it takes us to is exactly right.
The question it asks at the end can only be answered by using the affective part of the brain, the part we call the emotion, or spirit.
The poem's question reminds me of Wallace Stevens's, "Anecdote of the Jar."
In this poem, when a jar is placed on a hill in Tennessee, somehow the wilderness around it is "no longer wild."
The jar organizes the surroundings the way art does -- even wildly unstructured art places itself on a pedestal the minute it calls itself art.
And in Geyer's little poem, when the duck enters the dark, the dark is somehow organized around the quietness of the duck.
We know it's true, even though we can't exactly explain it.
Fleda Brown is professor emerita, University of Delaware, and past poet laureate of Delaware. For more of Fleda Brown's
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