In An Ancestral Haze
By Cassian Smith
Growing up in New England on the borders of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont, I often found myself staring out the windows, watching the birds pick at the feeders; among them were blue jays, goldfinches, cardinals, robins, and doves. Aided by a grandfather’s stolen field guide, I started to recognize the birds flitting around me. Now grown up, I still find myself connected to the birds, often linking them to childhood memories, my great-grandfather, now departed, and new connections at The University of Maine. Included in this small piece of the ever-growing collection ‘In An Ancestral Haze,’ I explore the natural wonders of the rising sun, the mysteries of perception and connection, and growing up in the junkyard behind my great-grandparents’ home, watching the feeders that were perpetually kept until both of their deaths. With interests in Folklore both personal and global, and the transmission of story and how it relates to the globalization of our world, I employ myself as an observer of the mundane, connecting disparate ideas in an attempt to understand the ever-changing landscape I live within. Continually asking, “Where are the birds of our childhoods?” I write to show that they are not gone so long as we can remember to seek them out.
I
In the far flung reaches of that brambled, berried, barrenbush, greenleaves gone with the first hints of a long overwinter. You, glossy, dipped in honey and soaking on the sunning porch and dulling with the sudden dip of winter solstice. You, nipping indistinctly at the flat red that clashes with the inkwell cracked yellow of each feather, even as dulled by the ever night sky. Morning glory in melody, a rise of the new day. You are the grateful reminder of cold mornings that will tiptoe their way into snowmelt days and back into the blueberry-crisped sugar, a summertime stay. A rising of the sun in the early morning and a long, drawn-out goodbye over the lone mountain valley.
You are yet the return of the sun.
American Goldfinch
Spinus tristis
II
We, the twisting silent forms, beaten butter silence, smooth across the rough skies. Rue bourbon wingtips spread across delightful, mooned dark clove shadows. We are the quiet hunters that shift in the night, low, echoed calls, bouncing in distinct directions. Watching wide-eyed from trees too far for your weak pupils to see. Watching for a glint of the mouse’s back. Sheen across the landscape’s flat. Background, its movements, almost indistinct from a leaf’s faint skitter. We see, silently waiting in that alabaster grey night, past the plastering winds that stick to brownstone frozen trees like decorated lace. All to watch you stumble and swirl through the distant winter wonderland while you achieve, reaching for that distant star. Ten feet from the doorstep, you fall, dead before the door.
We are the watchers of watchers, you noticed
Barred Owl
Strix varia
III
Sweeping in the memorybrooks of old forests that I used to explore, broken trucks and buses, ripped apart and made anew, building materials for forts beyond imagined size, there is you. Beady-eyed and shining, sitting along on the bird feeder, chasing away all those commonplace pretties that live and eat and move together in great swarming swaths of black on brown on grey on brown. You only, in an enchanting brightness of blued hue, basking in the victory of your prize, a feeder for yourself. I watch you, tiptoeing your way forward across the ledge to snap and bite at those small ones that flocked and scattered, unbothered by the rodents that fed with them. You, always solitary, alone in your stark contrasting coloration, a blue as the sky and loud as the day, scaring those littles off to scatter enviously to branches until a noise, almost imperceptible, scares you off. Your whim changed, you leave to find something new and interesting to perceive.
I miss you when you leave, even if there is no one to notice you are gone.
Blue Jay
Cyanocitta cristata