D. E. Steward

Azure-winged Magpies 
MAR19.B33

 

Days after Prague and Budapest (a fine Aida on Margitsziget, with a real elephant), within the silence of Vienna’s Kunsthistorische Museum in awe before the twelve big Pieter Bruegel panel paintings

Bruegel black, Bruegel’s browns

Ponder that sixteenth century world while in front of one after the other is a European epiphany

Their time-span sensation of silence

These high-horizon five- and six-foot flat panels that begot their humanistic world’s absorbing detail for all down the line 

An antique world with pre-modern truths brought on ahead 

Bruegel, d. 1569, painted the first, “The Battle Between Carnival and Lent,” in 1559 and most of the rest of the dozen in his last decade

Insightful far beyond the obvious, but…

“culture, hardened to shellac‘s empty / usage, defines in definitions / hoaxdoms of remove from the true life”  (A. R. Ammons)

Our life is not peasant life and festivals, crows and harvest traditions

We are somewhere else

But the wonder of the corvids, all corvids, is still intact

Nothing as alive as magpies moving through a landscape

Graciously enhanced if the birds are brilliantly colored azure-winged magpies

Sky blue sometimes violet toned tails long as their body length

Cyanopica cyana, spectacularly gregarious in Portuguese cork forests and disjunctively throughout much of Asia from Sichuan north into southern Kamchatka

Long time conjecture that the Portuguese and Spanish navigators brought them from China to Iberia in the sixteenth century but the marked differences in the Iberian azure-winged bird discourages that improbable idea

Various other Asian varieties of blue magpies following each other tree to tree, their long tails lifting behind

Evidence the universal corvid craft nearly everywhere there is a cascade of savvy crows, the ravens, the jays, the universal tribe of magpies, all of them

Absolutely distinctive as is the peculiar nearly absinthe yellowish plumage of the green jays following down the thickly forested arroyos off el Ávila above Caracas

Curious, small, peering around eye level from the foliage 

Corvids always on perch above your foibles, watching

Sharing the quiet of a marsh rabbit low in the soapberry on the flats just on the far side of the Boca Chica Naval Air Station fence off Geiger Key

Marsh rabbit hindquarters of the same shape as a capybara, stubby and raised

With deliberate and quizzical rodential mien

Marsh-rabbit solitude

Most animals are alone most of the time

As many of us

Dissimilar from the gregarious capybaras, usually in bands of a few females, a few males and their juveniles ranging around in and out of the water around Iguazú, the Pantanal and all over the Amazon Basin

With coatis trotting around in groups less amiably, tails raised, leaping up into the trees, down into the streambed gullies 

Marsh rabbit munching away there in the Keys, tail-flicking palm warblers flitting low back and forth around the joewood nearby, barn swallows flashing across

Strong morning sun, breezeless, only a couple of weeks until the equinox

On the way out to Geiger Key a wood stork on perch behind white ibises in the basin at the cutoff

Ibises moving hurriedly like probing ghosts 

Franz Marc and August Macke met in 1910 as determined young painters and the course of der Blaue Reiter within German Expressionism was cast

Kandinsky’s career lasted into the 1940s but both Marc and Macke were doomed to the First World War’s abattoir 

Macke in his twenties killed immediately in 1914, Marc in 1916 at age 36 at Verdun

And that was almost that

And religiose and patriotic violence rolls on

Why did gifted people march off to those European wars, why did they go

Why do people still go off to fight 

Lemmings in a panicked world

“Slave auctions in the so-called Islamic State in parts of Iraq and Syria were advertised on Facebook”  (John Gray, Seven Types of Atheism)

Osip Mandelstam exiled to a camp in the Kama River country east of Perm in the Urals

“Lead me into the night by the Yenesey / where the pine torches the star”  (Mandelstam)

He died in late 1938 during a second winter transport to the Far East

“The wolfhound age springs at my shoulders”  (Mandelstam)

Had made it south to Voronezh to be with his wife in 1935 but was soon rearrested there

“I hear the Arctic throbbing with Soviet pistons”  (Mandelstam in “Stanzas”)

East of Thunder Bay three-hundred fifty miles south of Peawanuck up in Polar Bear Provincial Park on Hudson Bay, March 4, 2019, minus 16C

Still late winter there at ten minutes before six in early dusk, a single female hoary redpoll gorging in the pan of a thistle seed feeder suddenly stops, looks around then flits nimbly off, probably to a thick spruce for the night

She had been feeding alone ravenously for many minutes, the last of her mixed flock of more than a dozen common and hoary redpolls excitedly working the feeder table and its hanging tubes

Above a thick buildup of lead white snow

Redpolls breed worldwide around the arctic, all that space up there, and are estimated in the tens of millions, only rarely south of New York State and only in winter  

The muskie and northern pike fishing camps throughout northwestern Ontario that are beginning to reopen now as the river and lake ice starts to go

Next to arrive in Ontario will be the famous Point Pelee warbler wave

That in late May 2018 arrived in numbers exceeding all recent norms, perplexing, happily, tropical rainforest passerine population pessimists

Birds continue to come, each spring they move north in flights of tens of thousands, some circling and crashing into the night-lighted high buildings in Dallas, St. Louis, Chicago, and up the East Coast megalopolis

Where exactly now in the new twenty-first century New York, 1,300 feet high with much open-sky reflecting glass, 30 Hudson Yards, lofts improbably with all the others as if in Hong Kong

What an amazing and fated world

Whoever's left down far the line will talk with wonder about this generation living on the cusp of the ultimate knockout and doing what it can to mitigate

As peregrines nest on Portland’s Willamette Bridge’s arches, that’s like a cliff for them, but with no updraft to promote lift, the fledglings fall into the river

The local Audubon people go out in kayaks to rescue them when it’s time

Back east of Thunder Bay again, March 3lst at sundown, clear, the temperature plus 2C

On the same big feeder table are three common redpolls at rest, two females, one male, quiet as if apparently pondering the end of day

One female faces the male about a span away, the other sits to the side looking on

They are as if finished with the concerns of the day

Personified description justified, these little boreal finches are what they are, alive, fully aware of each other

And with a distinctly vesperal mood about their tableau

At least twice the male redpoll opens his bill voluntarily

The female opposite the same, no other movement, they are extremely calm and the three remain so for two minutes or so

Until the female to the side pecks listlessly once or twice at the seeds on which they are sitting and the two others do the same

Then one female quietly shifts slightly in place and flies fringilline fast away

The other two leave equally rapidly to roost somewhere 

In the almost early spring upper Ontario night

 

D. E. Steward mainly writes months. Most of them are published, as is much of his short poetry. Five volumes of his months came out in 2018 as Chroma.