Wing Man

A poem near to Father's Day.

Sandhill cranes in flight. Photo by Jeffrey Hamilton on Unsplash

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This is the post I published just before Father’s Day last year. I don’t think I can improve on it, so here it is again. However you spent last Sunday, I hope the day was what you needed it to be.

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MY FATHER, WATCHING BIRDS                                        2023


My father never spoke of prayer
or talked about religion. He watched birds.

All his vigorous life, as tasks and trail allowed; 
more, then, as vigor ebbed, as it became a pleasure
to sit on his back porch in a battered lawn-chair
while sparrows, juncos, finches danced and bobbed
amid the seed he scattered on the picnic table,
while hummingbirds like sequined drones came darting
at angles to their feeders and away –
sitting so loose, so still, long legs stretched out
and crossed in front of him, that once (he loved
to tell this story) a hummingbird lit, a heartbeat long,
on the toe of his boot, pierced him with its gleaming
pinprick gaze before it zoomed aloft again.

And in nesting season, how he would drive
his truck down the sidest of side-roads to a clearing
near a lake, unfold the same lawn-chair (with others,
if his daughters came along), and sit for hours,
field glasses trained on one towering broken tree-top
where ospreys nested every year – just sit and stare
in patient hope, rewarded maybe by a twitch high up,
maybe a fledgling’s head or clumsy wing, on rare
spectacle-days a parent osprey soaring in to light
on the nest’s edge, a fish gripped in its talons.

And then on a drive with his daughters,
the winter he told them he wanted to die –
how on the dirt road by the reservoir he lifted
his head, listening, told my sister to stop the car,
levered his tall spent frame erect against the open door,
and gazed up hungry to where a flock of cranes
skimmed across the dull sky, clattered calls light 
and sharp in the cold air. “Oh,” said my father softly, 
and turned his head to watch their free strong flight
till distance vanished them on the horizon.

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He wasn’t a birder, my dad. He didn’t have a life-list. What he had was keen eyes and ears, a short stack of bird-books at home, and a chosen job that kept him outdoors most of the time, in the kind of country that’s mostly reached by rough dirt road or by footpath. He could identify a lot of wild things — by their shapes and colors, the sounds they made, the tracks they left behind. They all delighted him.

Birds, though. Birds were special.

Dad wasn’t drawn to church or to philosophy or even to introspection. He was an intelligent man who relished the life of the body, staying strong and active for as long as he possibly could. He was an introvert’s introvert, often taciturn but a fine storyteller when you could get him started. Neither his upbringing nor his inclinations had led him to seek out any vocabulary or syntax for expressing emotional and spiritual truths. I think that to the extent that he needed those truths expressed in his life, he relied on the creatures around him, human and otherwise, to do it for him. And I think that birds, those creatures of earth and air (and water, some of them), embodied a truth for him that he didn’t venture to name.

Or that could just be his daughter reaching back to find a connection to a man who baffled her, often, as much as she baffled him. Sometimes love looks a lot like bafflement. Sometimes it looks like sitting in lawn-chairs for hours, staring up at a nest at the top of a tree fifty yards away. Sometimes it looks like a chorus of cranes crossing a winter sky.