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Image: For the Birds (study), oil and cold wax on paper
I’ve been thinking about sandpipers lately. How I miss seeing them during their migration through my home turf back in New Brunswick. They arrive every year to feed on the mud shrimp and other treats they find along the Bay of Fundy Shores, especially at Shepody Bay near Johnson’s Mills. That’s just a few miles from where I grew up, but I wasn’t really aware of these delightful little birds and their passage until I was an adult, visiting from British Columbia, where I now live. The sandpipers feast on the mudflats from July to September every year, almost doubling their weight as they prepare for their 72-hour, non-stop flight back to South America.
This week’s Wednesday Poem, then, is Bird Watcher at Dorchester Cape, from my book, Belonging (Sono Nis). I used ‘poetic license’ when it came to the title. Dorchester Cape isn’t, technically, where you go to see the sandpipers – but it is very close to Johnson’s Mills, and at first I confused the two. So when I wrote the poem, I used Dorchester Cape; when I discovered I had the place name wrong, I left it in the title anyway … because to my ear it just sounds better.
Bird Watcher at Dorchester Cape
But occasionally, when he least expects it,
in the glass of a wave a painted fish
like a work of art across his sight
reminds him of something he doesn't know
"Poor Bird" P.K. Page
How could she miss them, pale tan on the mud flats;
a myriad of peeps here somewhere, come from away to feed –
she stands at the edge of a gravel road straining to see.
The tide nibbling in and the bright bluebells
twitching with Queen Anne's lace in the wind, at first
fill up her eyes. Then the land begins to lift:
again and again, all those birds, blurred air, composed profusion
the perfect music of a fugue, this synchronicity
in a winged field. Something inside her shifts.
But occasionally, when she least expects it
a lone sandpiper stays behind, too intrigued
with its small patch of tidal land to fly
off in the hope of finding what it already has.
Dashing this way and that, it drills in familiar ground,
each spot offering something
undiscovered, something the whole flock missed.
The solitaire scatters prints along the shore
until suddenly, in the wash of the oncoming tide
it halts; stares at the water as if
in the glass of a wave a painted fish
appears, brilliant fins stiff in its liquid home,
an exotic body rising from the depth of somewhere else
and with each breath of the bay, drifting closer
to the sandpiper's feet, a colourful puzzle.
She observes the stillness of the bird –
imagines it will soon take flight,
half hoping it will find
its designated place in the flock, returning now,
a curvature of movement, brown and white
like a work of art across her sight,
a restless sketch, sunlit into diamonds and topaz,
the radiance luring her gaze away
from the odd sandpiper enchanted, she thinks, by the tide.
She blinks in disbelief at jewelled air,
the like of which she's never seen before.
The glitter flutters briefly, then the show
dissolves to camouflage. Her heart beats wild as wings
when the solitaire breaks its trance to race
straight into the multitude, whose safe shadow
reminds her of something she doesn't know.
Bird Watcher at Dorchester Cape, is a glosa on P.K. Page's glosa (Poor Bird), which is a glosa on Elizabeth Bishop's poem Sandpiper. Page describes the glosa form as "... the opening quatrain written by another poet; followed by four ten-line stanzas, their concluding lines taken consecutively from the quatrain; their sixth and ninth lines rhyming with the borrowed tenth." (Hologram, A Book of Glosas, Brick). For a change, in this poem, I abided by all the elements of the form rather than omit or vary bits – though the rhymes here are as often close as they are perfect (meaning only some of the sounds in the rhyming words are similar, as opposed to having all but the beginning sound in those words match).