Blackbird

The only songbird dark enough to bear the word,

though most are deep chestnut, we remember them

lonely, their jackets radiant as tar, wet with a black

conjured as many when there is one. There will be

only many named as one, our loneliness a plural.

And namelessness no more or less. If a blackbird

enters a song and kills the light, it is only the mind

in search of company, when there is none, solitude

when voiceless, a blacker black inside the darkness.

The sound of a blackbird turns to music the moment

we hear in it the sound before, not over there and yet

not here, like the younger body in the one we carry.

The dust of homes is mostly skin. Face falls from face,

apple from the apple tree. The past never dies. It is

too busy dying, too busy being born, close as pulses are

in funeral promenades. Music is material. No more,

a little less. Which is why we hear there an inexorable

sadness and relief, so like ours who can tell the difference.

So tell me about your mother, the blackbird said,

and I was just about to mention her, which is odd,

because I have not thought of her in years, which is

odder still, and no sooner she appeared as a blackbird.

That is what happens in therapy. We see one bird

in another, and sometimes it helps us talk to those

long gone, it helps to console the black gowns of some

garden that has closed now, and we say, I am sorry,

as birds do, when we hear them speaking through us.

If your eye could turn around in its head, it would see

the black the artists used in drawings of the Neolithic age.

From the proto-Germanic blakkaz, meaning burned,

as were the bones ground up to make visible the bulls

of the Lascaux caves. Thus to return the femur to its

likeness. I want to say desire fashioned from the hunted

a portrait of the hungry in the hunt. By the crackle of torches

dipped in fat, they made peace with their gods, the ones

they ate, the way a cave eats an echo, longing to survive.

To blackbird, I have learned, is a verb, to make a slave

also known as a blackbird in the South Pacific, a word

cruel in spite and light of the music whose many silences

haunt the question. Who there does the naming.

To blackbird thus is to darken or erase, to load

the hold deep with suffering that just might sing or not.

That part is obsidian. Stone. Who are you, it asks.

Who enters still the ship in chains, as blood enters

blood, beneath the skin, where none alive can find them.

Today the world is made of glass, and what a glass bird

needs is an unbroken song, and sing he did, my friend

they found with a note of explanation. He played bass violin,

chest against the chamber, the church door of the strings.

I say he sang, because the voice is our first instrument

and last, what every other follows. Phrase by phrase.

Each melody will tell you. Music comes in waves. It whitens

the air and waits to let it clear. Everything is breathing.

I have not read the letter left behind. I cannot.

I do not know what the man in the language needs

a friend to understand. But he is writing. I do see that.

He must have felt the desire to speak, to connect one

portion of his aloneness to another. A page lays to rest

a heavy window on a desk. A desk against the earth.

Even at night, the window could say, Go ahead, look.

Maybe we do and see nothing. Maybe we say nothing

to mean the room around us, the embers of a face.

When Wallace Stevens says, he is of three minds

like three trees, inside each a blackbird, I see the writer

pause, look up, let the letters scatter from his yard.

I see a friend. In every tree, a breeze unravels, shreds,

and somewhere on the far side mends. But it is this

breakage we hear. The voice of a writer who sees in

each act of seeing affinity and evasion, arousal, song,

a room in the private portion of an unhappy home.

Dear reader, the living say, and the paper flutters.

I dreamt to blackbird was to pare away the admissions

of our fictions. To say I am the bird, when what we mean

feathers what we say. Who does not long to be some part

of the story and yet survive it. To voice it where we are.

Somewhere on the path, I felt obliged to say the other as

other. Remember, language says, and then it wanders off

into the silence indistinguishable from words. Sometimes

death visits a friend. They talk. And I want to be involved,

included. To say, I am death, and leave my friend alone.

Pioneers of the talking cure believe the messages of sleep

elude us, so that we might encounter them safely at a distance.

We can walk into the burning house unscathed, a childhood

address where our mothers glisten with firelight and tears.

We can enter the open field on the other side of a speechless

friend and take comfort in the patter of slippers moving on.

For every dream is a love song now. It has something to lose.

In the higher registers of flame, a little laughter. In memory

of an evening too light to bear, the wings of ash, crossing over.

Or not. Just might be my father heard us in his sleep

and then forgot. Not every freedom is chosen, loved.

One day a blackbird visits our window, just like that,

and we are elsewhere, in another house. We are placing

another washcloth on the forehead of a man in a fever.

Then we think of a day we put out the fire with the last

of our canteen, and we swore we heard a bird overhead.

The never chosen, always free. Then we lift the cloth.

We dry the skin, whisper something not even we can hear.

And so the birds arrived in numbers, and as they rose and fell,

they became a sea of inuendoes, inflections of the whole. If

they flew into a broken pattern, none can say who broke it.

I cannot count the times my mom broke down and then regathered.

She cleared her throat, tucked a wisp of hair behind her ear.

I can’t explain the meaning of a choice, let alone the citizen

who chooses. Is the soul the chirping lantern in the harbor

or the night that turns it to a star. Is that you inside the laughter

of the gulls who search, at dawn, what the moon dragged in.

At the end of the world, or rather just before, a blackbird

goes to work. She will take her place on a wire that carries

a final message through the last land line in Prescott, Arizona,

famous for its wind that breathes above the chat and weeping

of the phones. Then a silence. Its burden laid in the meadow

of the other side. And all things, being last, will feel the pressure

of a reader. A bird will hear you listening, and is this not what

you wanted, what you imagined all along. To don your black

jacket with the others and make listening a voice, to hear it sing.

The most consoling number is the most regretful, fatal.

A blackbird taught me. It led me into the woods at night.

It whispered, a man and a woman and a blackbird are one.

And not, of course, or one could never say so. It sounded

like scripture. The promise of marriage beyond experience.

A blackbird taught me to write my horrors down, to look

at them, out there in the land of other people’s suffering.

Do not hate yourself, it said. It helps no one. Then, for all

I know, it left. It turned the shade of the night between us.

Take heart, says the blackbird. The good news is a dream,

however frightened, never quite begins or ends, like a string

quartet prefaced in the calm that turns, beyond the lifting

of the bows, into a gate. A latch relinquishes, at last, its claim.

In the higher register of fire, heaven throws down a rope

of smoke to pull what burns away. I know a person of faith

who tells me I am fine. I will be fine. He is certain, he says.

Otherwise, he could not bear it. Take heart, he says. I love that.

I love much of what I half-believe, the good news, the friend.