YODELING IN AN EMPTY HOUSE
Those chatty starlings are back, and the loquacious grackles.
Every spring they perch around my chimney, squawking
and trilling down the flue. I kneel by my cold hearth,
raking ashes. It’s clear they are like us, those birds,
they love bouncing their voices off cave walls,
they love listening to that reverb and echo tell them
exactly what they want to hear about spring, and mud.
If I send my whistle up to them, they fall silent, the way I would
in Montreal if someone asked me comment ça va? Es-tu perdu,
pauvre fou, pauvre américain… I can tell
they’re up there translating, crossing names off
a list of birds—not cardinal, not robin, maybe some drunk catbird
lost his balance and fell down among the cinders. It doesn’t take long
for them to lose interest and go back to their conversation.
Well, I’m guilty, too. Half of my time amounts to little more
than yodeling in an empty house, howling, and laughing
at my own jokes. I play alone like Dai Benxiao in his studio.
His brushes are still wet with sumi. A zither sits on his day bed.
It is raining, he says, Xià yǔle. What music sounds better?
And like him, I keep talking over the melody, like him, I call
my chattering a poem. But even I can’t keep up with the starlings.
Now they are having some kind of debate, it seems,
and there’s no point in me joining in. It’s less dialectic,
more recital, I understand. Why would they want to talk to anyone
who disagrees with them about how nice rain is, what a necessity
evicting blue birds from their nests has become?
I don’t want to imply the starlings are heartless, but they sound
a little too excited. They’re flapping their wings just for the thrill,
not one word of dissent among them, not a single mention of justice.
_______________
William Welch
Review by Jared Pearce
Fun and slick and meaty, I like how this poem joggles around, touches and moves, and am intrigued by the mention of justice.
Review by Dave Mehler
I enjoy what an important role birds play in this piece. Starlings are often referred to as garbage birds, on a par with pigeons, communal, messy, and very adaptable to coexistence with humans. What might be lesser known perhaps is that Eugene Schieffelin introduced over a hundred from Europe to Central Park, NYC in 1860 so that America would have every species of bird (60) mentioned in the plays of Shakespeare. It turns out these birds are highly intelligent and social, flying in enigmatic shape-shifting clouds of murmuration (purely for fun?), and utilize their language recursively, are capable of sophisticated mimicry, and developing their own grammar that we don’t fully understand. Welch is attentive to what’s going on around his house, and rather than write the birds off as merely pests, nesting in or near his chimney, he is curious and hospitable and attempts to interact. I picture him singing riffs from “The Lonely Goatherd” in his house just to mix things up. Bringing up singing/yodeling is such an inventive move, I don’t doubt for a moment that he must be basing this from his own life, which causes the speaker to be all the more eccentric and endearing. The poem talks about how chatty the starlings are, but the poet imitates this stylistically himself, bring up the vagaries of language, communication, yodeling, the 17th century Chinese landscape artist, Dai Benxiao. Welch is a maximalist stylistically, but while the poem seems discursive and SOC running off the rails driven on seemingly wild tangential steam, the poem recursively is subtly building an argument, that goes something like this: we live communally, but are so often divided, ignoring or underestimating those around us, which includes those in close proximity and those distant in time or around the world speaking in other languages. We go about our business too often in isolation, on autopilot, locked into looking down at our phones, but then also magically there is singing, joy, art and life all around us at our fingertips which might bring us together and surmount some of those barriers if only we paid a little more attention, as this speaker does? And if we had a little more curiosity and took a little more time to notice and appreciate that wonder and beauty around us closer than own backyard, it’s possible that perhaps, like the starlings we might just find more commonality, work together, even become more just? Harmonious? Happy? Add to the beauty others bring to the table near and further afield? I also understand William had one of the hardest, longest winters in upstate NY he can remember. Spring and clear skies have seemed far-off. Sometimes we write to console and cheer ourselves up, and it doesn’t take much to get us there, if only you’re attentive. The starlings are even cheerful about the rain.