John Hoppenthaler, Bird Riff
Bird Riff
Rancor lilies clamor in the White House Garden.
Gardener maddened, birds frighten
and take to the wing.
Tasting freedom
again. Noah’s dove never returned.
Birds,
emboldened now, taunt from nearby trees,
squawk into microphones and shit on
the windowpanes. Birds
have hollow bones; that’s why flight is a fragile
miracle, held aloft by faith and science, and birds,
descended from dinosaurs, are creatures of instinct: not
smart but wary. Millions of birds are killed
each year by domestic and feral cats
or shredded in wind turbines.
Some birds
come and go through fluid borders. If left
alone, they are beautiful while they’re here. Hummingbirds
squabble and fence
with their beaks over red-dyed sugar water poured into feeders.
They hover, I assume, near lilies in the garden of the White House.
They’ve mistaken all the blood for food.
We’ve given
a BB gun as a gift.
Thousands of songbirds
are killed each year by careless children. A murmuration
of starling shifts as one body in flight. The swirl
confuses owls and hawks; when the sun
goes down, they roost together in a safe patch of trees.
I love the audacity of birds
braving larger tormenters, chasing them from their nests.
A stone Age vulture-
bone flute is likely the oldest musical instrument. Researchers guess
music helped humans communicate and form tight social bonds—air
blown through a vulture bone or its trilling from the throats of wrens.
For some
indigenous Americans, eagle-bone flutes are sacred objects,
used for sun dancing, praying and healing.
I love the audacity
of birds, braving tormentors and chasing them
from their nests. The mobbing call is delivered,
and they cooperate, harass predators to protect their young. Nestlings
leap free of their moss-woven vantage points and into faith
and science. When you see a dead bird on the roadside, spit
on it so you don’t get it for supper. When you hear a bird
thud against glass, cringe and await death
in the family. A swallow flew down the chimney and circled
the room three times before I thought
to open the front door and encourage him out.
The sun dance
was prohibited by immigrant settlers. Indigenous people
weren’t allowed to openly practice ceremony again
until the late 1970s, after a period of high activism,
including legal challenges to those laws. Noah’s
dove never returned
after the third flight, but after the second,
when the dove alit onto his hand in the evening,
there in its beak was a freshly plucked olive leaf. Listen
to the mockingbird, still singing where the weeping willows wave.
“Bird Riff” appears, in a slightly different form, in Night Wing over Metropolitan Area.
John Hoppenthaler’s books of poetry are Night Wing Over Metropolitan Area, Domestic Garden, Anticipate the Coming Reservoir, and Lives of Water, all with Carnegie Mellon UP. With Kazim, Ali, he has co-edited a volume of essays on the poetry of Jean Valentine, This-World Company (U of Michigan P). His poetry and essays appear in Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, New York Magazine, Southern Review, Poetry Northwest, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency,Southeast Review, Blackbird, Southern Humanities Review, and many other journals, anthologies, and textbooks. He is a Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at East Carolina University.
Born in Brooklyn, NY in 1960, he lived in Queens, NY until 1965, when his family moved to New City, NY. He received an AA in Poetry Writing from Rockland Community College and a BS in English from the State University of New York at Brockport. Hoppenthaler received his MFA in Poetry Writing from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1988. He served as Personal Assistant to Nobel Prize-winning writer Toni Morrison from December 1997-August 2006. He was the editor of A Poetry Congeries for ten years and the Poetry Editor of Kestrel for twelve years.
His poetry has been praised by award-winning authors that include former US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey, MacArthur Genius Award recipient Campbell McGrath, Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter Rosanne Cash, and American Book Award winner Li-Young Lee, Dorianne Laux, David St. John, David Baker, Brian Turner, and Michael Waters.
He lives in Raleigh, NC, with his wife Christy, his stepson, Danny, and Pablo the dog.