Fata Morgana: Poems

These Are the Things

These Are the Things For Amy Newman Days go by like bits of feather in a light, sky-colored breeze, on their way to being the same, then back again. House finch wings (purple finches only winter here, depart by May, no real distinction between those pinkish-reds), tufted titmouse wings (pugnacious, nervous also), mourning dove wings, white-throated sparrow wings (some stay year round, but most go north in spring); less commonly, cardinal’s wings, a mated pair, one scarlet, one olive gray hinted with red. (These are the birds at the feeders out our windows, part of the cardinals’ territory. The finches and cardinals will only eat the bigger seeds.) The mockingbirds in their black and white formalwear eat insects, sometimes suet, or so I’ve read, berries during winter when bugs are scarce: sing several songs in frantic, jumbled succession, no sense of subsequence. All of the words say “Keepaway.” Say “This is mine.” The mourning doves and sparrows forage the ground for fallen seeds, sparrows won’t stray far from cover, a thicket of azalea bushes fronting the house: in riotous pink bloom all March, thoroughly withered by mid-April. We drive downtown to walk the breakwater promenade, gulls are waiting (black-headed laughing all year round, herring in winter, mostly gone by now, Bonaparte’s in migratory transition spring and fall), brown pelicans over the bay (you don’t realize how big they are until you see one alone, one afternoon a flock of white pelicans passed through right over the house in a ragged, broken V, they don’t live here), and the occasional matte black cormorant. A man is painting a wooden fence wood color, ubiquitous drab pigeons prowl the red brick pavements and wire mesh construction fences, their colors muted but still many. Run at them and they scatter, wind fills their bones and they’re aswim in sky. What distinguishes them from air? 85 Shepherd PG:Layout 1 12/20/06 5:27 PM Page 85 ...