Birds, part two

The first one I remember hearing was a cardinal. Or, the first one I noticed and trice to commit to memory the trill. The rhythm and the pitch, he said, the two parts. So I tapped my hand against my thigh in a pat-pat-pat-pat-pat and sung her song inside my skull, like a silent echo. A quick happy whistle followed by the low-pitched twitter. He was still asleep inside, and I was standing still in our backyard, waiting to get in my car and drive to work, repeating a song to myself. I didn't want to wake him up to ask him. When I remembered, later that week, I was surprised to still have retained the noise, bouncing around inside the hollows of my brain. "Cardinal," he said, without pause. "Northern Cardinal. They're everywhere."

I was so proud, as if I had discovered some ancient secret, a hidden language that he was born knowing, to which I had finally found my way. What I mean is, every time I hear a bird sing, I think of him.

Birds, part three

We were visiting his family, all the men and me hiking to the top of a mountain, but they're in better shape than I am, so we lagged behind, and he taught me the new pieces of music he had learned in our two weeks apart, as we heard them in the rustling, sun-streaked pine forest of his New York home. Mostly it was the red-eyed vireo, which really does have red eyes and looks quite devilish, as I later learned. Teaching it the wrong word, because he wasn't showing off; he was on a hike, he is constantly aware, in this heightened state of awareness of the bird calls transmitting around him and I could begin to pick up that frequency, too.

This time, he told me that a lot of birds--but not all-- have words or phrases associated with their calls, to help ornithologists more easily remember and identify them. I was elated,bu the reality and the symbolism; now that we were dealing with words, we were in my territory, a new land for which I had my own maps. besides that, it meant that science and the art of language could find in each other a partner. He needed my knowledge of syllabication, verse, assonance and timbre, just as I needed his ability to hear music and see feathers in even the most dense tree cover.

"Teach-er, Teach-er, Teach-er, Teach-er," he repeated, stopping in his tracks, grabbing at my elbow, as all good teachers do, knowing that absolute stillness is the best location for learning. We heard it's call and he repeated his English interpretation, identifying it as the Ovenbird. Ovenbirds build massive nests up against the sides of things, like trees or houses, and enter them by the side, making them look as if they are roasting little birds inside their own ovens. I tried to remember the call, but up over the next steep rocky hill along the trail, another bird called, only to him. "That was it," he said, "the ovenbird." But it had slipped through my fingers. I hadn't recognized it. But after the next and then the next time, I realized why. "The syllabication is off," I said, excited, Shakespeare excited. "The ovenbird sings in a trochaic foot, not an iambic!" I explained the difference as I caught my breath, my palm beating against his chest in a yellow meadow, before we pushed over the last hill to reach the top. We made it up the mountain, and sat, mostly silent, in the rusted, dormant chair-lift from this mountain's days as a ski resort, waiting for the next ovenbird, decided we would revise its call, for our own purposes, to "I teach, I teach, I teach, I teach, I teach."