Why We'll Love
The Bluebird:
A Notebook

"Sacramento River, along barren hills, tawny,
And spurts of shallow wind from the bay
And on the bridges my tires drum out a meter.
– Milosz, from "The Separate Notebooks"












He suggests to himself daily that there are few left.
A voice from radio news is nearly pungent.
It is that there may be a kernel of truth in the verbiage
that he continues to listen as the billboards pass,
as the orange cones that line our lives surround
us all left and right as the river below, green, floods.


How could he not remember the years that passed when, young, his mind had come to fill with the necessity of nature, not the nature of the previous generations of farmers and hunters, of the stern men with long jaws who hid in blinds with shotguns waiting for the birds to pass overhead – the smell of those feathers eventually, the buckshot laced in the untamed meat of the mallards – but a nature that was the fabric of the very self, the wetlands that passed by on long bike rides, how the green smatterings of landscape were composites of his own relative speed through that very scene. He could not have seen then this was a truer earthly love. Trails up limestone ridges; how the flora and fauna evolved as the climb rose up to peaks, over and over again, to touch the sky, and that hope rose in unison as the sounds of the city fell to shadow and then disappeared.


Now out the window of the city house flood water
is expelled out of a long white hose that reaches the sidewalk.
Houses across the street wrapped in autumn gloom
as climate has arrested its old patterns and sit to brood.
Earth asks for little; it takes; it tries to breath; we pass
in cars and swift and calculated dreams that tether us to screens.
He once sat outside on a back deck and wondered
whether it was a bluebird he observed circling a new nest.


Bluebird, bluebird what am I
Bluebird, a fine and delicate art
bluebird a flash of all things
Provide the sky; the leaves for nesting;
Bluebird, someday we will learn
to love the world (ourselves) again


"In like manner, if there is anything grand and daring in human thought or virtue, any reliance on the vast, the unknown; any presentiment, any extravagance on faith, the spiritualist adopts it as most in nature." – Emerson, from The Transcendentalist