Conversations with Ghosts: Birds, Brent Hendricks
by Johannes on Jan.08, 2011, under Uncategorized
That: Birds
My husband, Brent Hendricks, wrote the poem I post below in around 2004, when we were living near the deep woods of Western Massachusetts. We had a neighbor whose tree house was on an island in the middle of a wetland in the woods behind our house. He let us sit on the dock whenever we wanted to, and there we’d listen to the redwing blackbirds.
“Queen of Diamonds” was published in The New Review of Literature in Spring 2005. It is part of Brent’s new deck of card poems. I’m posting this telepathic poem, one of my favorites of his, for all the dead birds of 2011 so far. [There are supposed to be stanza breaks in the poem, but I'm having trouble getting the site to put them in. Will continue to fix and apologies, Brent.]
This: Brent Hendricks
Queen of Diamonds
Today birds are dropping from trees,
wires, leaping from rooftops and
ledges.
Like some divine reverse
of the rapture they’re
falling, hitting the pavement with tiny
thuds. Of course everyone feels bad about it
and the news says they’re crazy
but who isn’t crazy? People have different problems
and so can birds. And for me personally
it’s not the way they do it — folding their wings
on the edge of whatever
and just letting go.
It’s the sound
drives me crazy,
I hate that little hollow-
boned thud. But
really, I’ve always loved birds.
I even had a dog who loved birds so much
he killed cats . . . I loved that dog.
And along the same lines
I wish I’d held more birds in my hands –
the few I did were so light and sweet, very
scared.
So I loved my dog and I love birds.
I’m already tired of a world without birds.
**
Brent Hendricks is a graduate of Harvard Law School and the MFA program at the University of Arizona. He is the author of Thaumatrope (Action Books, 2007) and his work has appeared in a number of magazines, including Black Warrior Review, Bomb, Conjunctions, Iowa Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Prairie Schooner and Tarpaulin Sky.
January 8th, 2011 on 5:57 pm
Rules!
January 9th, 2011 on 9:11 pm
great. poor birds killed by fireworks. poor birds killed in oil spill. i don’t know who that dog was, but i would have liked to know her / him.
January 10th, 2011 on 3:36 pm
“People have different problems/and so can birds.” Love this. This reminds me of Andy Warhol, a strange intertext for an ecological elegy. And yet there is something obviously elegaic in the below quote from Warhol, too, but in this case the multiplication of images/media stands in for the multiple bodies of birds in Brent’s poems…:
“If anybody wants to know what those summer days of ’66 were like in New York with us, all I can say is go see Chelsea Girls. I’ve never seen it without feeling in the pit of my stomach that I was right back there all over again. It may have looked like a horror show– “cubicles in hell”– to some outside people, but to us it was more like a comfort– after all, we were a group of people who understood each other’s problems.”
July 27th, 2011 on 9:19 pm
I came across your wonderful poem accidentally when I was googling images of redwiged blackbirds for a painting that I have had in my head for a long while that I would like to get onto canvas. The picture above is alot like the picture I have had in my head only the the bird was facing the other direction. I live near alot of rice fields in Arkansas and was deeply sadened when the news came several months ago about the fallen birds. However I wrote a poem myself about this bird several years ago.
A Rice Field
A taut thread
divides the clear universe
from the uniform
green, green, green.
Parallel with the thread,
a red winged blackbird
flies; descends; and
bends a blade of
rice with his weight.
All I can see is red.
Lori J Watson