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from Life-List: First Bird (for R.T.P.)

Poetry By Mark Daniel Miller

"Loon!" I cried, half crazy as one,
"Loon! Loon!"
No bird on golden pond, either,
No Walden loon,
Pursued by paddle
Over the smooth surface
Like a Cheshire checker
In a lunatic checker game.
("Suddenly your adversary's checker
Disappears beneath the board,
And the problem is
To place yours nearest to where his
Will appear again.")
No, this bird bobbed
In the mop-water chop
Off Rockport, in Aransas Bay;
Was dwarfed
By the grey immensity
Of sea and sky;
Was silent:
No weird, unearthly yodel

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Or maniacal laugh.
Yet there it was,
The black and white checkered back (source
Of the checkerboard metaphor
In Thoreau)
Stark and unmistakable;
The bird (now rapidly receding from view)
As small and plain
As the small, plain, black and white illustration
In my new bird book:
Roger Tory Peterson's
A Field Guide to the Birds
of Texas.
(The loon I had mainly known until then
Was foreignat least to me.
It was the lavishly-painted, L. L. Bean loon
In the first plate
Of the beginner's guide from Golden.
I can still see it:
The wary stare
Of the bold red eye
Fixing the viewer;
The black head,
With its faint green sheen
And daggerlike bill,
Contrasting sharply
With the pale background:
Water whitening
Towards a distant shore;
The shore
A steep jut
Of pale grey rock,
Topped by a spiring line
Of deep green fir;
Beyond the fir, a pastel sky
Of softest aquamarine;
A nearer jut

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Of fir-topped rock
In the middle distance,
The brown and green
Reflected
Brokenly
In the intimate small waters
Of the cove or pond;
A watery mirror
Of the bird itself
In the immediate foreground,
The reflected image
Blurred by the rolling, concentric ripples
Emanating
From the real thing,
The ripples dividing
The glassy surface
Into broad, expanding rings
Of green and blue;
And in one small spot
On the bird's back,
A white illuminescence
From the white checks
So bright,
It fuzzes the edges
Of the black:
The sheen
Of the soft white sun
In that Northern sky.
I can still see it,
But the loon I was seeing then
Was the loon I had just been taught to see
By Peterson:
The loon right there
Before my eyes.)

"Loon!" I cried
Above the engine's din,

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The spray's white hiss,
The tympany of wind about my ears.
"Loon! Loon!"
And all who were not already there
Rushed abaft,
Rushed astern where
A big American flag
Whipped and popped
And the trailing crowd of Laughers
Yukked it up.
The passengers were mostly elderly,
And very kindly,
And took pity
On me, my brothers, and my dad;
For there we were,
Ill-clad and ill-equipped,
Obvious novices
On the M.V. Whooping Crane.
(Poor Scoutsthough Scouts all,
Either present or past
We were not prepared
For the rawness of the wind,
The fierceness of the blast;
And the most powerful optical equipment we had
Was the telephoto lensI don't recall
What "X"on the turret
Of Dad's old movie camera:
The solid, 8mm, Bell-and-Howell wind-up.
I had that,
Mounted on the spidery tripod.
We didn't even have a pair of binoculars!
Only the stubby pair of opera glasses
I had received a few years back.
Nevertheless, I saw
The loonI was always
A good spotter
And, like the catechist

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About to say his catechism
Or the bar mitzvah
About to read his text,
I was nervous but excited,
Confident of my abilities,
And ready
To sing out
The name.)

"Loon!" I cried,
My heart pounding.
"Loon! Loon!"
And all the elders on the boat
Came flocking around me,
Took a look for themselves,
And confirmed;
Then, they congratulated me
On my sighting:
"Good spotting!" they said,
Or "Good bird!"

I was thirteen.
It was April 7th, 1968,
The National Day of Mourning
For Dr. King.
(And what was Mom thinking
As she read the Sunday papers
While she waited for us
Back at the Sea Gun Inn?)

During the several years that I had been birding
Seriously, I had started my life-list
All over again
Several times; for the more I learned,
The more I would eventually come to doubt
The validity of certain sightings
And, doubting part,
Would eventually so derogate
The whole

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That characteristically I yearned
For a fresh beginning,
A new start.

Since "Loon, Common"
Was the first bird
On the A. O. U. Checklist
(A serendipitous neatness);
Since I expected to list
A lot of birds
On this trip to Aransas
(And did: 49 the first day
Including the Whooper
Another dozen the next);
And especially since, with this bird,
I felt I had made it
Felt I had finally been initiated
Into the cult
Of the full-fledged birder
I decided again,
Right then and there,
To start my life-list
From scratch.

Or, rather, I decided to start
With this:
        1. Common Loon          Aransas Bay (from the M.V. 4/7/68
                                             Whooping Crane), Aransas
                                             County, Texas

"Loon!" I had cried, half crazy as one,
"Loon! Loon!"
And as I watched it
A checkered flag afloat
Rollercoaster over
The waves of our wake,
I felt that, while I had won
One race, another
Had just begun. ||

Mark Daniel Miller teaches creative writing, literature, and composition at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. He has published several articles on the life and work of Robert Penn Warren, and recently served as president of The Robert Penn Warren Circle. His poetry has appeared in The New York Quarterly, The Pawn Review, and elsewhere. His poem, "First Bird," is part of a mixed-genre, autobiographical work in progress, entitled Life-List. From Texas, Professor Miller joined the English and Communications department in 1986.

Comments or problems should be addressed to webmaste@mcla.mass.edu.

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