Passage

  "When one is seen gliding through the woods and close to the observer, it passes like a thought, and on trying to see it again the eye searches in vain; the bird is gone."

 

  *  *  *

 

"An infinite number,"

said Champlain, on the islands,

in 1605 &

 

took a great

quantity. "Fully as abundant as

fish," said the

 

Jesuit Fathers in

Acadia, 1610. "Incredible," added Stork

from Florida, 1766.

 

"Broke down trees,

took all food," Lawson, History

of Carolina, 1701.

 

They robbed "a

very great quantity of English

grain," complained Winthrop,

 

Plymouth Colony, 1643,

then (1648), blessed their presence,

"it being incredible

 

what multitudes of

them were killed daily." Alexander

Wilson spoke of

 

a flight to

Green River, Kentucky, 240 miles

of packed sky,

estimated 2,230,272,000 individuals,

who devoured 17,424,000 bushels of

nuts every day.

 

Their nests—over

100 per tree—projected broken

limbs, ejecta like

 

deep snow. Below,

herds of fattening hogs gobbled

eggs, dead squabs.

 

"Light of noonday

sun was obscured as by

an eclipse," quoth

 

Audubon, soon after,

1813, about a flight which

darkened the sky

 

for three days.

As flocks alighted, branches gave

way, killing hundreds

 

of birds below.

Trees two feet in diameter

were broken off

 

near the ground.

Their winter roost noise was

"like a gale

 

passing through the

rigging of a close-reefed vessel."

No one dared

 

go into the

woods at night. GATHERINGS OF

by far the

 

most abundant bird

in the world. Columba migratorius,

Passenger Pigeon (extinct).

 

 

                *  *  *

 

Pigeon

comes to the mouth

via Latin pipio, piper

 

  (When Pope Gregory was dictating his homilies in Ezekiel, a veil was drawn between his secretary and himself. The servant peeked through and beheld a dove seated on Gregory's head, with its beak between his lips. When the dove withdrew its beak the Holy Pontiff spoke.)

 

dove

arises from the Gothic dubo

meaning diver,

as Columba, from Greek,

means also diver

(resemblance to gulls?).

 

In & out, roundabout, each passage pipio measured

long as a fine bottle of champagne,

perfect profile dove. Bright

skyblue back, breast of clay red,

head like an aerial chesspiece: The Flier,

to come down anywhere & checkmate the field.

 

Each pipio of passage had a

shiny, moving eye.

        When the lady

saw him dance,

eggs began to roll.

        When the gentleman

saw her settle down to brood,

"pigeon's milk" wetted his crop.

Each pipio billed & cooed.

Bloody fights.

Monogamous, but not fanatic.

Voice like love.

 

Each pipio stuck its black beak in drink, sucked

up continuous drafts of water

(bird-unique; all others

gargle at the moon).

 

Each pipio of passage

pumped blood into plump chest to push

pointed wings 80 mph, high

like a whistling arrow.

"Plumage peculiarly dense, but easily detached."

Love salt mud.

 

Twelve feathers (each

narrowed & obtusely sharp) made up

the graduated tail.

 

Rich beauties of each bird (gone forever): glosses of the

yellow

 

brown

 

purple

metal

 

& the outer web edgings of the primaries

orange-cinnamon.

 

Hollow bones, & the

Black Spot (concealed) in each wing.

 

1 or 2 pure white

eggs laid in a

frail flat of twigs.

 

Hoo woo!-oo—hoo, hoo, hoo, cries the scattered little sister.

 

 

    There once was a passenger dove

    Who divided to billions by love.

    The infinite flights

    Intercepted the lights

    That normally flowed from above.

 

    & the clef of that feathered eclipse

    Let alignments of notes to the lips

    Of the faces thereunder,

    Effusions of wonder:

    "...the flotillas of lavender ships!"

 

    When the pigeons alighted, the land

    Was bedecked, as by miles of sand.

    Each grain was a world

    That eons had whirled

    & would flutter & sing on your hand.

 

    Each feather was made of a million

    Thin barbules that wove a pavilion

    Of aerial moves

    Beating nitrogen grooves:

    Light plough to sheer shine along sillion.

 

    Nobody knows what the brain

    Of the dove did create or contain:

    Its particular way

    Of perceiving each day,

    Plus intricate pleasure & pain.

 

    But its mind was an avian elf

    That spun, for the sake of itself,

    Blue volumes of knowledge,

    Columbian college,

    Atmosphere's continent shelf.

 

    Just like a lost city of wells

    Cupping dark informational swells,

    Circling mesmeric streams

    Of numbers & dreams—

    Single cell in the bellum of cells.

 

 

    The paths of penultimate glory

    Could be loud & colossally gory—

    Of delicate riots

    Of intimate quiets.

    Chief Pokagon tells us this story:

 

                *  *  *

"One morning

On leaving my wigwam I was startled

By hearing a gurgling,

Rumbling sound,

As though

An army of horses laden with sleigh bells was advancing

Through the deep forests.

I concluded that

Instead of tramping horses

It was distant thunder; and yet the

Morning was clear, calm and beautiful.

Nearer and nearer came

The strange commingling sounds of

Sleigh bells, mixed

With rumblings of an approaching storm. I beheld

Moving toward me in an unbroken front

Millions of pigeons.

They passed like a cloud

Through the branches of the high trees,

Through the underbrush and over

The ground, overturning

Every leaf. They fluttered all

About me; gently

I caught

Two in my hands

And concealed them

Under my blanket.

. . .They were mating.

I sat down and carefully watched

Their movements. I tried to Understand

Their strange language and why

They all chatted in

Concert. The

Great onmoving mass passed by me,

But the trees were still

Filled with them uttering

To their mates

Those strange wooing notes I

Had mistaken for

The ringing of bells."

                (lines broken)

 

                *  *  *

 

  Ahh, those "pigeon mornings!" You'd "shoot enough before breakfast to load a hay wagon, with the sides on, full to the brim." When the flocks came in, the whole town'd be out with flintlocks, queen's arms, string-tied gun locks. It's been known that a fowler get 71 birds with two flint-lock shots. And there'd be clubs, stones, smudge-pots, raking poles. And especially nets, great, grain-baited nets. And pigeon-baited. Just take a pigeon and sew his eyes shut so he'll flutter, pin his legs to a chunk of wood (the "stool") and watch 'em come pouring in like all the stars in the sky but a lot better eating. Those pigeons were unsuspicious. Walk into the woods and they'd be cooing all around you, raising kids left and right. The squabs were prime, and cheap 'cause Nature did the dirty work.

  And of course we're talking Market. Market, market huge and nationwide. Just one New York merchant sold 18,000 pigeons a day, and there were many more like him. Cities and town all over just gobbled pigeons up. A delicacy! Trainloads of 'em were chugging all over America. Not just the meat—the feathers and down went into pillows and quilts. Gizzards, guts, blood and excrement sold as medical cures for damn near everything—gall stones, stomachache, dysentery, colic, infected eyes, fever and epilepsy.

  And the live birds for trapshooting took about a million a year. One club would use up 50,000 for a week's shooting. Naturally piles of 'em would die in capture, or during transport, or break their necks or wings being hurled from the catapult. Still, one sporting gentleman might kill 500 in a day.

  Nobody thought the wild pigeons were anything but infinite bounty. Till about 1850, some diminishment was noted. 28 little years later, the last great nesting took place, near Petoskey, Michigan, 100,000 acres of leftover beech. Telegraph spread the news, and railways focused the thousand pro netters, plus locals from all over, like glassed rays on a bug. Every possible pigeon was slaughtered, a million or more. 

  Then where were they all? The netters' story was that vast numbers had drowned in Lake Michigan, and in the ocean, caught in storms. Other folk were scratching their heads about it, decades later. A great mystery, such rich abundance, to lose its coherence, to go out like a light. Something cockeyed somewhere.

  Northern Indians loved pigeon meat too, but never killed till the squabs were ready to fly. Advantages of Indian time. They cajoled, then threatened, whites to exercise a like moderation, to no avail. A last quarter million descended from the North in 1896 (for the Passenger Pigeon migrated any direction) and nested near Mammoth Cave. They might as well have nested at the bottom of the sea. All but 5,000 were slaughtered. Then the entire kill, in boxcars, was derailed, some kind of railroad accident, and every bird rotted by the tracks.

  The last known wild pigeon was shot four years later, 1900, by a small boy in Ohio (a future President, rumor has it).

 

                *  *  *

Too much was not enough.

The party got too rough.

The big old woods

Delivered the goods

& the pigeons' flight

Was massive purple light

Until death

Mechanized its dire breath,

Till bony chance

Turned from a dance

To a march

Over the arch

Made of slaughter,

Over the air-without-water

& out.

 

____

 

When royal commonality miles wide

& fifty feet thick pipes its own breath,

& pigeon's milk flows sweetly

Through the convulsions of the crowd—so the

Crash of broken homes is just a tinkle in a

Roaring red-blue song—so the parental bill

Is a fluttering pipe organ forest, vast enought to chart—

So the rich blood, wing to wing, caresses the chance orphan—

Then the violent thinning of that

Explodes an atmosphere, blows holes

Through a general, moon-colored, feathery flesh,

Tatters population that it

Pisses its peculiar oxygen into No-bird's-land.

 

Already, in the very center of the rich, chaotic, pigeon

Country they carried anywhere,

Through breathtaking thin air,

Was a white eye—the single egg, absolute

Number & color certainty,

Central circle in a whirlwind of rainbows—

A hole to stick a finger in, curl tight & jerk.

 

Ain't no maybes, boss, there's safety in

Numbers but not near enough of it.

Somebody's pushing pins into my giant singing poem, my

Everything syndrome!

("Why not take all of me?")

 

It is possible to lose my coherence though I am billions of breathing comets.

It is possible to lose my coherence though I am billions of breathing.

It is possible to lose my coherence though I am billions of.

It is possible to lose my coherence though I am billions.

It is possible to lose my coherence though I am.

It is possible to lose my coherence though I.

It is possible to lose my coherence though.

It is possible to lose my coherence.

It is possible to lose my.

It is possible to lose.

It is possible to.

It is possible.

It is.

It.

 

Hoo woo!-oo—hoo, hoo, hoo.

 

They seemed to be all things, exchanges

of earth & sky—

feathers, words pressed dry, from flash-

in-concert to an isolate float, lit up, letting fly,

settling to rest, infesting forest with violet

violence, leaving reeking plaster over

bronze landscape, squatting

iridescent figures of strong streamline,

atmospheric opals,

but the very diamond is but buttonbright against the wonderdumb

luster of the last crumb of terra firma crust:

coming up—sky

being sucked out, leaving a blot, oceans

going up in smoke,

molecules re

forming. & is there an end to all things? Tectonic plates

wiped clean? & we are

birds of passage

birds of passage

birds of passage.

We are

pipers in Avernus,

getting along,

concentrating & leveling.

The beating of infinite wings

PLUNGES through the body,

passes the breath, & down through

space barely shaped to perfection, bird of passage,

everything pointing at light

ness, to that most

complex occurrence, double curls of genetic

acid, & down

to nothing

one more time.

 

*  *  *

 

Wake up & okay!

In the shapes of leaves-&-sky I see

Snarling little demons.

 

*  *  *

 

Vast, breathing, pearly presence

Extinguished by wonderful

Intelligent cancer.