And one more.
And more San Diego poem, and then I'm
going to close with the Montana poem.
I guess you'd call this the hermit meets hyper reality.
It starts with a bird in Montana and ends up
in San Diego with something that I usually don't do.
It has lots of literary allusions, lots of statistics,
and so forth.
Emily Dickinson, I'll give you the clues.
Emily Dickinson is in here, Nathaniel Hawthorne,
and Alexander Pope.
"The Intricacy of the Song Inverse to the Dull Lores."
"We learned the song of Swainson's thrush
as we sat on the deck talking of science
under a comet littered sky.
One rude note circled us and then the flute.
If only we lived a little higher,
deeper in the boreal forest, said the ornithologist,
we might hear the hermit.
Nightingale ascending Dvorak's symphony From the New World.
Rufous tailed piano, swamp piccolo.
Why always a fascination with what is higher, disinclined?
Everyone loves a hermit, be it human or bird,
spare room a narrow perch.
Behind a cedar hedge inside a yellow picket fence,
children cluttered as a poet, like Rapunzel
from her second story window, bobbed sweet bait on a string.
She would not come down to them, nor would
the utopist under his eaves drinking clarett,
taking notes on the grace of pigs, the glaucous seaweed.
Yet even bees drown in their own honey.
And no one attends the recluse every day.
No one likes the taciturn one, the inadequate personality.
Vita voluntaria, a life of no fixed rules,
cautioned the Saints, leads to degeneration.
Last February a neighbor called The Hunch,
for her misshapen body, strung herself from the cabin rafters.
She'd been the village crone, the dried
rose in the steamer trunk long enough.
The way that Alexander Pope dug a melancholy and brooding hole,
studded it with Cornish diamonds, coral branches,
burnished flint till he turned the dirt subaqueous,
so the world would look different when he arose.
So I too draw the drapes, away from humans.
Bottlenose dolphins spend 87% of their time
at the far end of the pool, and still they
get ulcers in the zoo, balancing all day like ballerinas
taking first position.
5.8 acres per human and no species would go extinct.
Scientists say our brains grow larger, not wiser,
from processing information.
25 birds in formation fly 70% further than one alone.
If I were a bird, I'd be the hermit thrush.
Brown and brown again, like an old rag rug,
he will not sing on the wintering ground.
He will not sing during migration.
He knows 5,000 versions of the same song.
He'll only sing alone near dusk when there's no competition.
Once I rubbed my body with mother's vanishing cream
till I reeked and slid with hiding.
But you have to be obvious to make a living.
Mockingbirds learned to grind their gears
to mimic the cry of the freeway, and even the whisper
of a stranger as it floats toward an unborn human ear
will register 20 decibels in the womb."
True.
But isn't it strange.
How do they know?
It's-- the way they know is a cellist was pregnant--
to tell you the story.
And her group was practicing under a bridge,
and the baby started to kick up, and would just
have a fit every time she would practice
her cello under the bridge, and so they did a decibel reading
and discovered that it so magnified the sound
and drove it back into her body that the kid was just
going nuts over this.
And I mean, this is the way that I came to feel in San Diego,
that the air itself was saying occupied, occupied.
Don't take a breath.