Over the years, I’ve written a lot of poems and bits of fiction about birds; crows mostly, also gulls, hawks, pelicans. Owls are said to be the familiars of the poet. One fall/winter in the mid 1990s, I had a pair of them nesting in a tree outside my house. If if was a good omen, as they say it is, I can’t say of what. There was no watershed of fortune, inspiration, or even good digestion the attribution of which to those hooty little beasts would not amount to logical fallacy. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc.

Below is one of my favorite poems about birds. I wrote it in Delano back in the late 1990s, sitting in the cold Valley autumn air, and thinking about a girl. She’s long decamped, and the poem has probably been posted here before. So if you’re looking for something a little fresher, and maybe better, here’s a link to somebody else:

A Meeting Of The Birds by John Kinsella. Read it aloud; his language is crisp and tactile, and much to be admired.

THE CROWS

Having breakfast with Papa
as the morning slowly warms
from freezing, thinking of animals.
The coyote cultivates his heart
to sadness, moves alone for food,
dies on the road.

Out in the almond orchards and grapes
from electric wires and trees
a flock of crows is lifted up.
By noon I’ve seen a few
perched in the old mulberry
cut back for winter.

The crows speak of my unspeakable
solitude, and though I struggle
and pray against such thoughts,
I think of your body: your throat,
breasts, delicate hands.

Your hands. I know that a man
must die of such thoughts, or
die of how distant you are.
Like the distance
from this quiet house in a flat town
to the silent encircling hills,
with clouds pretending to be snow.

(c) by J. Kyle Kimberlin
all rights reserved

Some of us suffer terribly,

the grass a sea of needles,

the birds singing in bitter cries

that break our hearts;

the floors unstable, the chairs

brittle and hard, their dead

wood unlovable and lost.

Some of us are singing

happily into death or into

afternoons with children

naming the shapes of clouds

that lead the shadows of force

off the sea. There is tea

in the evening and the windows

shine the inner spaces back to us.

Some of us are looking for answers,

good and evil and the best road

home, and where to stop

for the night with a dog.

Then at the end, will God still love

us if we’re spent?

Some of us can jump, dance, melt

the snow with our bodies, call down

the rain for something to laugh at,

restless in the hastening wind

or in a night without wine, spending

the hours with our ghosts.

Some of us find ourselves

in little cups left here and there

about the house, cups

chipped and faded by washing,

stained by the joy of our parents.

We hear their voices all night

in the breeze over the shingles

and in the chimney, all night.

©J. Kyle Kimberlin

2nd Draft, 12.07.2008

I had a dream when I was twenty-three
– you remember – my last year of college.
I was far from home and it was cold.
There was a flock of crows, a thousand,
maybe more, flying eastward at twilight.
The sky was saffron and they were pure
and perfect black, cawing loudly down
at me. Suddenly they stopped, frozen
in flight, in mid-stroke of every wing,
silent. I waited. It grew dark and every bird
began to glow dim red or blue, brightening,
becoming magic lanterns hung by wires
from the pure black sky.
When I was forty, they had our grandpa
in the hospital – you remember – he had
that stroke and took so long to die.
There were magic lanterns hung by wires
in the dining hall, glowing red and blue.
So I waited with him. I waited months,
years, and then a generation beside him.
He died and I am waiting even now.
I’m growing old, but they still haven’t
turned back into crows.

is here. My Dad is a happy guy. He loves rain. Well, he ought to get a kick out of this; it’s really coming down.

Did you know that the word weather is sometimes abbreviated Wx? It’s true. So here’s a Wx poem for you, from several years ago.

BETWEEN STORMS

Sad, how the clouds gather again
against the small hills
for reasons I cannot comprehend,
and how I stand here watching
the last boat carrying men
from oil rigs in the cast iron sea.

Sad, how all the gulls are home
asleep, having eaten all day,
how I see the shadow of the clock
on the water, its hands turning
from island to harbor
to the tender sand beneath my feet.

So sad, how finally I am rising up,
falling in a long arc
into the mountains of darkness.

© J. Kyle Kimberlin
All Rights Reserved

Child, if you care to remember
this world, this life
you dream like a path
of certain distance quickly
walked and centered on a hill,
if you care to open it like
watermelon in summer
or like a prayer box
bearing a constellation of crosses
and sunsets, I hope
you consider your father,
his overtures to death
his music, and like sunlight
through the sprinkler
on a simple greening lawn,
his smile.

JKK
1.10.2008

It is so hard to leave
the old ones alone
with their painkillers, tomatoes,
blocks of cheese
in the icebox, bread frozen
for later, canned fish.

The clock that no one
can wind anymore.

It is hard to leave, to back
down the driveway, turn
and look back, the house leaning
into October. And all
down the San Joaquin valley
tonight, the harvest moon
is weak, becoming blind.

The vineyards reach
into that blindness,
go on like headstones
to the feet of the hills.

Just yards from the edge
of the road, the ghosts of
coyotes pace back and forth
along the fence,
strange friends of your
longing, sympathetic and sad.

The old dog, deaf and blind, stirs
in her blanket on the seat,
says nothing, then sleeps.
And the moon is up
but shrinking as it climbs.

Is sentiment a bad thing in writing? To be avoided, like incomplete sentences or beginning a sentence with an article? And shunned? Well. I don’t know, but I was watching a movie earlier, in which a writer is asking someone what they think of his new novel, and refers to sentimentality as if it were bad. I think maybe we like to be sentimental. We like to go into the dark, warm places where the purblind puppies of memory are sleeping.

Pictures Of My Forgetting

Since I am being forgotten by time,
I offer these pictures of time I am losing.

I tell you I am aging relentlessly, blindly,
Open to the ocean air, like a sash window
framed by peeling paint. That’s how it is.
But I have been held close, held up,
into sunlight and moon wind, into branches
of old trees, held so tenderly and helped
to lean out over water rushing into death.

You and I are still alive. Don’t be afraid.

You know that life is hiding from us, though
we caught a glimpse this morning, where
it fell as light on the carpet by the door.
It rose and flew like a moth down the long
hall and disappeared. As a child I saw it rest
that way. It would lie by the window while
morning arrived and my grandmother
was singing in another room. It fluttered
by and rested a while on my hand. It spread
its wings and loved me, whispering a psalm.

The house is gone but not that room, not yet.

Look at this candle on the desk. Its tiny flame
is all we know of fire, no less than a sun. And all of
time is moving in this single clock. I wind it
twice a week and see behind the glass the marks
where Papa’s fingers brushed its face. We do not
die, his garden goes on forever. So we can see
him planting tomatoes in a day of late spring,
with Easter arisen, swaying in green
and yellow light. A breeze parts Grandma’s
linens drying on the line.

That day will live as long as we want it to.

From a distance he appears soft and kind
and now he is visible only at the focal length
of years. Seated on the sofa in an umber light
he sets his watch. Half past eternity. He looks
up at us as if to speak, but so much silence falls
between. Did he remember, as the evening
softened and grew dim, the cry of the dogs
through the tangled woods?

Did they know how much they were loved?