Birdsong

September 30, 2012

Birdsong

I open my window to let in the morning.

Beyond the sill, the birds bring on daylight, their wings

shining in the sunrise. Sparrows here, sparrows there,

flying in flocks with such mathematical grace, such

lovely arithmetic: tessellating in mid-

air, geometric shapes.Their pitched sounds follow them,

too musical to be language, too deliberate

to be song. What instinct could be so intricate?

One small winged thing lands delicately in front

of me, tilts its head, and chirps. Surprised, I reply,

but my concave mouth is shaped wrong, and the air ca-

tches on my teeth. I blink. The sparrow calls again.

My voice searches for sounds as sweet, but suddenly

I am tone-deaf against such perfect pitch. I try

to mimic in english, then spanish, maybe some

mandarin, but I can’t seem to get the notes right,

throat too complex to sing as purely as pan pipes,

too old to learn these melodic oscillations.

Little bird, little bird, perched on my window: as

you twitter and trill, what riddles do you tell, with

your ambisyllabic sonorants? What sonnets

do you spout, with their jumps, leaps, and resolutions?

Brown bird, you take off and familiarity

dissolves like a fog clearing; each wingbeat reveals

a glittering, alien scene,

                                        a strange new sun

rising on a foreign country, a foreign world.