Not just for the birds

Tag: Appalachian Book of the Dead

  • Poetry and Chukar Hunting

    Poetry and Chukar Hunting

    Sunlight lavishing brilliance

    Sunday, September Sunday … Outdoors,
    Like an early page from The Appalachian Book of the Dead,
    Sunlight lavishes brilliance on every surface,
    Doves settle, surreptitious angels, on tree limb and box branch,
    A crow calls, deep in its own darkness,
    Something like water ticks on
    Just there, beyond the horizon, just there, steady clock …

    Reading through some stuff for a school project, I came across a poem by Charles Wright called “The Appalachian Book of the Dead,” and some lines in it — because this is what happens sometimes when you allow yourself to read — arrested me and my chukar-on-the-brain-ness. The beginning of the poem, above, intersects with catalogs of my Hells Canyon chukar hunting memory. But it’s the end of the poem that really does it for me, brings it home in all the activity’s weirdness, struggling with the meaning of hunting and competing mortalities, the effort put into it, the miracle of motion, the season changes, and — mostly — the terrain…

    It always amazes me
    How landscape recalibrates the stations of the dead,
    How what we see jacks up
                                                      the odd quotient of what we don’t see,
    How God’s breath reconstitutes our walking up and walking down.
    First glimpse of autumn, stretched tight and snicked, a bad face lift,
    Flicks in and flicks out,
                                                a virtual reality.
    Time to begin the long division.
     
    Landscape recalibrating stations of the dead

    I feel like I’m constantly trying to answer the question for myself, “Why this?” Finding things like this poem, which I don’t “understand” really, helps articulate possible answers, and that’s satisfying. What are you searching for, not just when you’re out there, but — even more — afterward?

     
    I remember Charles Wright from the 1970s. He lived on a street in Laguna Beach next to one of my school friends, and he was a colleague of my dad’s at UC Irvine until he moved east to another university. I remember liking his voice and Southern accent, but it wasn’t until I started teaching English that I’d read any of his poems. I like how things come around in strange, boomerangy ways, paths crossing and getting reasserted unexpectedly, intersections which, if you have the time, notice themselves in you and amplify things you didn’t realize could be amplified.