A Migration of Birds

My friend Jenny – of Spokes and Petals – recently began posting a bird poem for each day of the month, as #MudSongs .

The first weekend in March felt like a summer climb.

Yesterday -the anniversary of my father’s death – we ventured into the Chugach front range and climbed Wolverine Peak. This moments hangs like a snowy pyramid over Anchorage. Only 5 and a half miles and a mile of vert from a trailhead, it is accessible. We climbed through ptarmigan’s strange karumphs and the browse of moose and up onto snowfields. At the summit, a raven circled us vocalizing as I had never heard. We drank the last of our coffee. Denali was visible, floating behind the Tordrillos. The Williwaw lakes were frozen up behind Williwaw peak, a rolling cascade of ice on the valley floor thousands of feet below. I laid in the sun. On Emma’s knee. Smiling.

The last note I got from my father read “Keep on climbing”. I had. I was living as fully as I could. I knew that on Monday at work the under-side of my nose would be sunburnt to a crisp. A memory of my mountains. I remembered a favorite bird poem atop that beautiful mountain. So, just for today, I will share a #MudSongs for March and from a book I was first given by my father.

        MIGRATION OF BIRDS
            Gary Snyder
                c. 1956
==========================

It started just now with a hummingbird
Hovering over the porch two yards away
                            then gone,
It stopped me studying.
I saw the redwood post
Leaning in clod ground
Tangled in a bush of yellow flowers
Higher than my head, through which we push
Every time we come inside--
The shadow network of the sunshine
Through its vines.  White-crowned sparrows
Make tremendous singings in the trees
The rooster down the valley crows and crows.
Jack Kerouac outside, behind my back
Reads the _Diamond_Sutra_ in the sun.
Yesterday I read _Migration_of_Birds;
The Golden Plover and the Arctic Tern.
Today that big abstraction's at our door
For juncoes and the robins all have left,
Broody scrabblers pick up bits of sting
And in this hazy day
Of April summer heat
Across the hill the seabirds
Chase Spring north along the coast:
Nesting in Alaska
In six weeks.