Wednesday 10 October 2018

The Robin

Everything in this poem was observed by myself from the vantage point of my upstairs windows. The poem, in blank verse, is 256 lines long and, for those who make it to the end, finishes with an encomium to all the birds and a brief consideration of what their experience teaches human beings. (I have added a separate little couplet at the end which may be a bit of blarney and therefore ignorable.)
 
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(Observed 15 May – 31 October 2014)

Mid-May a change was undeniable:
The robin which inhabited my view
Fell largely silent at his treetop post.
He still spent hours there, eyeing his domain,
Darting away to feed and soon returning,
But now his silence like a Trappist monk’s
Contrasted starkly with his past months’ song,
So liquid-graceful and unstoppable
Like a blithesome hillside brook leaping its way
From stone to stone and flinging flashings of      
The sun’s rich light back at its globe enstoned
In the cobalt gesso of the year’s young sky.
Through the long stretches of his sentry-spell,
As if in vows, his only song was but
A few brief notes, half-hearted, monochrome.
That understated mumble, an aside,
Held little beauty and was swallowed by
Apologetic silence like a sigh.
Most probably his young had now been reared
And if no second brood had been begun
He felt less anxious to assert control
Of feeding rights, but what a sea-change from
His sky-enthralling song of earlier months,
Irrupted by his body-seizing shout,
That geiger-counter tic repeated madly
Which clacked a warning to marauding males!
Be it his undersong or braggart “tac,”
He stood as clear atop the maple tree,  
Foregrounded by the May sky’s watered blue
And knocked by passing breezes like a guy,
As if he sat upon my hand and sang.
His bright red jumper like a woven flame
Flurried above his cream-down underdraws,
And even across the air-and-sunshine gulf
Which kept us separate I saw his throat
Like a little bellows pumping as he sang.
However, by month’s end he’d truanted
And all through June I wondered if he’d fought
His way into another robin’s ground
Or, bloodied, had been struck by the clawed club
Of a cat’s flailing paw. Then he’d reappear,
Most often morn and dusk, and briefly sing
His thin disjointed notes, then brace and dash
With stiffly rapid wings into the gloom
Before sunrise or that at sun’s repose.
And once at noon on a warm and shining day,
Pregnant with promise and the year’s lush hope,
I saw him on a cypress tree which crouched
Heavily lopped beneath my bedroom window.
He clung to the tree’s fronded fingers, busy
With song and fiery peering at his lands,
When foolishly dawdling in the soft-silk air
A fly nipped past. Pausing his bits of song,
The robin leapt and turned mid-air with push
Of toughly-working wings. His open beak
Homed and snapped, and working his wings again
He twisted, sinking to his initial perch,
Resuming song before his wings were stowed.
A mere five seconds, as it felt, had passed;
A stroller would not have noticed any hitch
In his discord musings, yet with fine control –
An acrobat enrapt with exploits far
From the trapeze’s safety-giving bar –
He’d trapped a morsel in the day’s non-end
Prospecting to unearth the flies and grubs
Which staunched the panging in his belly’s bag.
And then throughout July’s amassing heat
I saw no sign and heard no sound of that
Cantankerous brawler, this being the month
When robins moult and hug their solitude
In bush depths and tree crowns’ inner passageways,
The while their blazonings collapse all ragged
And shame them for the strut and pomp demanded
Of the purview-seizing potentate. Indeed,
Mid-August came before that self-sure scrap
Appeared again, red-wrapped and regal in
Refurbished robes. He looked good-sized and healthy,
His plumage fresh, his lower belly white.
It was seven on a blazing August morning
And straight he threw himself into a frantic
“No weaklings wanted” clackering, more like
A starling’s crazy telegraphic chatter
Than speech of one who vaunted royal robes.
He sat upon the stunted cypress tree;
With every fit of “tac-tac-tac” insistence
His under-beak closed and opened like a clapper;
Furiously he ducked his head and flung
His body downwards, hence his tail shot high
Above him, doubtless a forbidding sight
In robin pageantry, although exposing
My liege’s rear to the lèse-majesté 
Of a derisive kick should some crass anarch
Creep close. Eventually he ceased and perched
Benignly, taking lordly note of the day’s
Unfolding with bright-eyed inclinations of
His thumb-size head. I looked away a moment
And looking back he’d flown. Thereafterwards
Resuming as of right the maple tree’s
High crown, he sang his fragment undersong.
Not until winter’s pinching fast was done,
And New Year hormones scintillate to lust
And breeding, would I hear again that robin’s
Heaven-enthralling apogee of song
Like bell-notes’ fullness in soliloquy,
Healthful, hopeful and glorying in self,
Its crème de la crème of the springtime months.
This raised a thought. Was this pre-summer’s bird?
Within two years most robins will have died –
Disease, privation or some creature’s beak
Or jaws. And every year a deal of offspring
Clamour to grab scarce food and breeding grounds.
Was this sprite boisterer, so spick and trim,
The scion of the former laird who lay
A skeleton in bushes with some feathers
As a pall? I noticed in the passing days
That rather than patrol the maple at
Its highest angle, like a parapet
Which circumscribed the dome, as April’s bird
Had done, this sojourner preferred to sing
Among the lush new growth atop the dome
Obscuring him until in busy flit
From branch to branch as if to doublecheck
His bailey was unbreached, at last he’d claim
The battlement and sit there glumly sighing
Like Hamlet musing on his night-murk seeings
On Elsinore’s dark walls. Had the rough prince
Assumed the sceptre? Something like routine
Ensued. For remnant August and September
He’d launch the day in heavy gloaming perched
All dully in the maple tree and sing
As if to conjure up dawn light. In bed,
His reedy note would tease my ear like some
Thin ghost pleading for unction and swift farewell.
Rising at six, his cry still wheedled as
The swelling dawn enfleshed the garden trees
And dew-crust heath beyond. And then perhaps
He’d quit the maple, soon to reappear
On the many-feathered layers, sea-cliff green,
Of the cyprus tree to shout his bully warnings
To loose-loined runtlings cowering at distance.
Later, the feeding hours assuming sway,
He’d rest upon the cyprus tree or maple
To sing then listen. Some likewise tree-patrolling
Redbreast would carol back. My man would cock
An eye then sing then pause once more, his head
Traversing like a turret. That upstart brag
Daring to sing again, my bird snapped out
A crackling tune to stymie him. A pause –
But still he sang. His eyes agog, my man
Sang on; and so they quarrelled back and forth
For minutes, unseen both, but beak to beak
In combat nonetheless! And in October,
The year declining and the weather poor,
When broadleaf trees, discharging foliage,
Draped garden and wood walks in russet cloths,
And autumn smells of smoke and mould were rife,
There came a twilight day of ceaseless rain.
During a lull I saw the robin grubbing,
Then as the rain fell hard he flew for shelter
To the green-laced weavings of the cypress tree
Where, morning-paused from work, I studied him
From the gloomy vantage of my window sill.
Another robin, who knows where, began
To sing in beauty closely limning all
That glamour of their springtime ardency;
My robin, puzzled as a wide-eared child,
Peered round, wrongfooted by such fluency,
And shamefaced stumbled out his undersong.
Aware though of the song’s moth-tattered rags
He tried instead his warrior’s shout, but faint,
Awed by the potency of the unseen lover’s
Wrong-season chant. Shortly, the rain increased,
Mixing a hiss and clatter as it battered
The stolid soaking trunks and blighted leaves
Of oaks and chestnut trees along the lane
Whose weather sides turned black with the rain’s lash.
The cypress’ frondage thrummed, raced over by
Peltings of rain like oil; the robin, feathers
Awry under the rain’s assault, withdrew
Into the tree’s dark depths, lost to my sight,
But still he trickled out his undersong,
Responding to the non-stop singings of
His foe who, soaked or not, continued lauding
Existence which in chill and drenching fevers
Uncaringly might snuff him in a day.
How harsh, how razor-brutal, is the life –
From downless birth to death, in sun or snow,
In rain or drouth, replete or stark with hunger,
Not once reprieved from the air’s brash rigours –
Of robins, each no bigger than a ball
Of stuff to fit a lady’s purse! The rain
Poured blackly; finally the robins fell
To silence, and insensate matter pounded
At itself. There came a day a fortnight later
Of grey October calm; till then my scrap
Had proved elusive, but adrift at noon
And glancing idly from my window to
The cypress tree, at once I found myself
Accosted by a brown-bead eye agleam
With light distilled from the ashy crumble of      
The clouds, and set above a rufous cheek
Which shone in health like those of some hot boy                            
Straddling the tree to outperform a dare.
The robin chipped a few sweet notes, his eye   
Upon me but unreadable, his mild
Awareness of my presence like a balm,
A moment’s unction, soothing two cognitions
Of the solid world so distant as to be
Unbridgeable yet, so it seemed to me,
Conjoined in being and contingency
For one brief flash – an epiphanic moment
In which the world and all its trappings jolted,
Unknowable to those beyond the span
Of that shared glance. After, the bird flew off.
But soon he pinnacled the maple tree,
Swathed in a passing rag of blue-washed sky.
Leaning into the tidal flow of air
Supporting him as water does a fish,
He peered the ninety feet to the spatchcock ground
And dived, unhesitant, into that void
As plastic to his flight as clay is to
A sculptor. Falling far, he flattened then
With rapid wingbeats and a heart-pulse line,
A kiln-fired pellet moving faster than
My eye could catch, he disappeared among
The autumn-scruffy bushes on the heath.
And then I called to mind the crows and magpies,
Their raucous blatant thieving through the year,
The song-exultant blackbirds and the thrushes,
The soft-pink jays and olive cautious greenfinch,
The tits in noisy gangs adrift from bush
To bush in search of grubs, the howling swifts
And big-voiced creeping wren, the tawny owl
Splitting the night with its waver-sung hulloo,
Woodpeckers drumming like a creaking door,
The slaty kestrel hanging on the wind;
And under the horizon, scouring cliff
And shore, the gulls, those prancing scavengers,
Quick-tempered, racketing, and paltry sleepers:
The herring gull, its red-spot bill a vice,
The black-back with its mighty spread of wings,
Holding its ground against a snarling dog –
Those gliders of the sea-wind’s aching blast,
Corsairs of fortune and a sudden death:
All, all, from smallest finch to hunching falcon
Stand weather-soused warning for soft-flesh man
That aback his fire-engendered comforts of
The house, implacable biology
And physics’ sleek Achilles’ spear of time
Bear no apotheosis but a quittance
That’s blunt and irredeemable, and no
Rich flags of finery or vaunts of getting
Will stand as monument against that sunder.
That robin, rushing spritely to his tasks,
Anthropomorphic in his quizzing eye,
But soon struck dead by virus, looms as proof.

   (Beauty is truth. And truth is death.
   The robin sings – a poet’s breath.)

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© November 2014