Still Life with Starlings and Man.

Hill, Sean

    Every composition has elements,
                       and so my driving
                up to the ATM at the Wells
                        Fargo off Paul Bunyan Drive
                and finding a mother
          European starling and her
   two fledglings on the few yards
          of grass between me and Paul Bunyan
                  Drive makes us,
          to me, some kind
   of composition. She forages
         to feed them, and they watch
                        and imitate, the way
         a lot of learning takes place,
                                 picking up bits
                         of litter with their mouths
                  to see what's actually
         edible, one looks of innocence
                        with a candy wrapper in its bill
                 before dropping it to accept
          food from mother, rictus
          at her approach,
          that instinctual gape,
   and since I've initiated
          the transaction, the ATM,
                  having accepted
          my card, beeps at me
                 for more attention
   and I peck my PIN and can't
                 help watching
                        the starlings.
                 What are they doing
         there? I remember their
                  ancestors were brought
   to America for some
         purpose like mine.
                                       Schieffelin imported 60 in 1890
                                              brought them to Central
                                         Park to be released, not quite
                                                 manumitted, though
                                                it's from the Latin
for
                                                       to send forth
     from
     the hand
 the way I
                          imagine
                          Noah sent the raven
                          and the dove out into
                          the world
                          made new.
                                                      Eugene
Schieffelin,
                                                 a member of the
American
                                                 Acclimatization
Society,
                                            sought to better this
country
                                                         by bringing
over
                                           bits of Britannia, in his
case
                                               specifically all the
birds
                                               mentioned in all the
works
                                       of Shakespeare. The work of such
a
         society runs counter
         to my sense of things. I want
         to keep this North Star State,
         this Land of Ten Thousand
         Lakes inclement so I'll have
         a home to yearn for.
                                    But with "starling"
uttered only once
                                           in all of Shakespeare's
words,
                            Schieffelin's starlings' progeny
proliferated
                                          on this continent
immortalizing
                                     him only a little, not like the
Bard
                                             whose words fly and
brighten
   or blacken the sky. Today these fledglings'
                  bills gape and that wedge of air,
   the absence they wait to have filled,
                                 like the piece of cheese missing from
                         the wheel in a Dutch still life, a table
                               and banquet piece, with pheasant
                         and roerner
--I see it as if it has to be,
           though I can't be sure
   I've seen it--but it's startling.
           Those importers, seeking to improve
   this land had other projects. The ring-necked pheasant
           with its red eye patch surrounded
   by a glinting field of green deeper than kudzu
           back home, which threatens
   virid oblivion to the landscape--groves,
           gullies, old buildings, all gone
   under a blanket of kudzu like snow
           here in the still months, a dreamer's
   topiary garden in the giant land of my
           childhood. I'm always Jack hoping
   for a happy ending the way Noah
           hoped when he sent forth the dove a second
   time for news of the world
           and Schieffelin when he sent forth starlings
   into the New World to make it over, to make
           it Old and happily ever after.
   Nostalgia's a small act
           of thievery from the here and now
   and even the Geographic Cure can't
           rehabilitate us, won't heal us, and here we are
   marooned on subtle shores, deserted
           for our crime--leaving home. Here if folks
   are lucky and have lined their nests properly
           they grow into snowbirds and come fall
   migrate to warmer climes.
           They follow the flight of geese, a skein
                                     the same as the word for a hank
                              of yarn like a story spun, woven
                      like weft thread with a shuttle over
                     and under the warp, undulating
                 the way vessels on waves do
             carrying cargo to and fro over
         the ocean to weave us together.
   The flock's formation, a wedge,
         pointing south, where the wedge
            and maul wait behind the house
               for my father or me, when I arrive,
                   to rend wood, that is cleave, the same
                          as the word when breathed that holds
                              fast as we do in our absence, one
                                      from the other. The maul's
head
          kept in place by a small wedge
      forced into a smaller space.
   Geese alternate wingbeats,
      passing back lift, to buoy
         each other on their long journey.
         I wonder what moves a murmuration
               of starlings spilling like sheets billowing on
         clotheslines or water tripping on stones in gullies
                after rain or the grain of the palm of Dad's hand
and wood
         in the ark Noah built or words spilt from person
                to person like the chatter of a flock of starlings
         before they light out on their flight roiling
                like the heart of a Maroon dreaming she's
         in a barracoon again before waking to the green
                of the forest in the mountains and in that forest
         the tint of U.S. legal tender spit from the ATM,
   regurgitated currency, 20's stacked like the zo Africans
                                  a Dutch ship brought
         to Jamestown in 1619--traded them
   for provisions, one year before the Mayflower;
         by 1817 the American
   Colonization Society was founded
         to send surplus negroes, that is free
   Blacks, to Africa--to Liberia,
         a place where a Black man could realize
   his potential, a solution
         for the free Black problem in
   the United States--a white
         nation.
                 The Dutch boat that brought
             those Africans,
                                  a small drop in the swell
   of mercantilism
                              evidenced by the market
   for still lifes
                        among the burgeoning middle class
   of 17th-century Holland.
                                  Still lifes with roemers
   of waldglas,
                        wide wineglasses with decorative
   prunts,
                     dollops of glass
   pressed into their thick stems, for greasy fingers to grip
   for folks to sip wine at feast tables if these roemers
   weren't in still lifes
                                   in which you can see the way light
   lingers in wine and glass
                                   and surface holds more
   than brushstrokes.
                                   In this particular banquet
   piece, "Still Life with Oysters and Grapes"
   by Jan Davidsz de Heem he has brushed
   the way light plays
                              on the slick of oysters
   and the bloom of grapes,
                              that delicate gray
   powdery matter that fogs their skin; he's
   rendered these globes variegated
   with hues from green to gold to blue and red
   hanging off the table;
                              the oysters
   slide off the silver charger, and
   caterpillars crawl and butterflies light
   on the leaves
                          of vines hanging
   onto the grapes and
                               the leafy and slight branch
   clinging to the orange, because the branch
   is not clinging to a tree,
                               in a candlestick
   (or maybe it's a salt cellar)
                               shining. The artist
   found the reds of the hummingbird's gorget
         that I saw at the flowers--forsythia or jasmine,
   no, fuchsia--outside Lauren's mother's
         kitchen window (Ginny identified it as
   an Anna's hummingbird) depending
         on the cant of its head, depending
   on the way the flower's cocked,
      rapidly roving the range of reds--scarlet,
                       crimson, vermillion, maroon neckerchief
                       on the range or a top-shelf harlot's
                       corset or burlesque dancers'
                       garter driven by hunger and
                       commerce, see red, red in tooth
                       and claw, cerise, cochineal,
                       damask, sanguine, carmine,
                       fulvous, rubicund, rubescent, titian,
               red Japanese lady beetle red; those
   beetles were brought from Japan to eat
           aphids in pecan groves and they invade our house
   in the fall collecting in the corners
           of the ceiling. I envy them their footing,
   mine slipping, grounded in the South
           where kudzu was brought from Japan
   to prevent erosion. My ranging
          tendencies reach like kudzu tendrils.
                 That Anna's hummingbird and Jan de Heem's
   painting remind me of extraordinary
                 rendition--to be taken away suddenly,
   transported--an old tradition
                 fashionable again in recent times,
   funny how things come back.
   The receipt, this wisp,
                    this record from the machine will mark
   an end and release me
              to the day as the starlings carry on.