My Father, Counting Cranes

A poem about things that can be counted, and things that can't

Photo by Sterling Lanier on Unsplash

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All the poems I’ve written about my father also describe birds. This one has other wild things in it too, but birds get the closing lines.

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MY FATHER, COUNTING CRANES                                        2013


Nineteen leopard-lilies at the edge of the clearing.
A seven-point buck in the willows near the creek-bed.

When my father came (reluctantly) indoors to tell us
what creatures he had seen living out under the sky,
his reports were spare: names, locations, and always
a number, a count, his instant response to seeing.

Three chicks in the osprey nest above the lake.
Eight ground-squirrels foraging an empty camp-site.

Important to identify and place them in their setting,
give them the weight of quantity; impossible for him
to say what movement their presence made 
in his heart, in the moment he started counting.

Two does and three fawns at the salt lick on the hill.
A half-dozen woodpeckers in the pines across the creek.

If we were with him and looked where he pointed,
we might exclaim, describe; he would receive
our exclamations in accepting silence, adding 
no more than the count when he had made it.

Three plum trees in blossom behind an abandoned barn.
Twelve wild geese resting on the reservoir.

Only when the huge clouds of sand-hill cranes
came splashing down into the rice checks in the valley,
uttering their throaty, wood-flute-clattering calls, 
only then would he briefly abandon numbers for an adjective

of quality.  Their enchanting noises, he would say each time
he heard them, with the look on his face of a man reciting
the only love poem he has ever written; their enchanting noises,
he would say again, and then stare narrow-eyed across the flats, 

trying to quantify the restless, innumerable anglings
of wing and voice in the reeds and winter-white air.

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He was a lot of things, my dad: a Depression baby, a war hero, an introvert, an occasional charmer, an intelligent man with nearly no vocabulary or inclination to express his inner life. What he was most, from boyhood on, was an outdoorsman. His work and his leisure — as much of both as he could manage — were spent in the open air; he was comfortable and curious around wild creatures in a way he was never able to be around people.

I could spend a long time listing the ways that he and I are different. (My journals are full of those lists.) The older I get, though, the more aware I am of what he managed to pass along to me, from one introvert to another. So many camping trips, so many long afternoons at the wildlife refuge; so much I got to see because I was looking where he pointed.