Walking With Birds

                                            Walking With Birds

If the only thing I’ve done these last ten years 

is to make friends with the raven, 

to recognize her voice in the breathless cacophony of the desert highlands, 

the way her call sounds like a rascador; the mallet excavating the ridges 

of a carved wood-like gourd, 

or the way she perches atop the telephone pole, 

lifts her shoulders, spreads her wings, 

leans into her yell at my dogs, the challenge, 

teasing, warning, “Come chase me! Come get me!

I’ll peck off your nose!”

And if the only thing I’ve learned is the screech of the nighthawk 

and the buzz of her wings as she dives the evening sky; 

a drone sized dive bomber heading straight towards the ground, 

pulling up sharply, just-in-time, again and again,  

under a setting sun screaming pinks and oranges, beyond her,

behind the baffles of clouds, red mesas, indigo hills.

Or the songs of the mockingbirds that play in my ears, 

verses and choruses that cut through the wind, repeated in measures; 

never tiring of her notes, neither she nor I, 

they are Prokofiev symphonies, 

Mozart compositions, masterpieces I can not memorize but carry 

like touchstones, lilac memories, each time I hear them.

And the cerulean flash of bluebird wings skimming 

the tops of golden gamagrass seed heads, swooping and careening 

to piñon trees or juniper limbs whose blue berries’ color shrink

next to the backs of their winged brothers.

Or the burst of tangerine-orange-fading-to-lemon-yellow 

breast of the oriole under the sun as he perches and pecks obsidian beak 

into the juices of fruit I’ve sliced and set on the patio table just for him.

Gentle Says Phoebe, plaintive good-morrow, “too-whee, too-whee.

Too-whee.”

If I wake up one morning to dew on the yucca, petrichor stones, 

monsoon promise in heavy slate skies

and find I have forgotten all else but the breath of the birds, 

their palette, their scales, the beat of their wings; 

that I have no where to go but up,

it will have been worth every broken promise 

that landed me here.