Contributor’s Marginalia: V. Penelope Pelizzon responding to Triin Paja’s poem “Wing Diary”

Time’s wingèd chariot hurries near.

Time flies away.

(A diary, diurnal record of observations, is filled with time. It’s already a wingèd thing, even before it begins to describe other things with wings.)

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snippets.      fragments.      pages torn from a naturalist’s field log.

a poem in three parts           an ode to nesting/feeding/migrating

a poem in three seasons           midsummer – autumn/winter – early spring

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We are in a field, there are crickets, the rye is tall enough for a large bird to shelter in, it is high summer in the north. What is a western marsh harrier doing hiding on the ground? She must be nesting. I check the bird guide. Her breeding range across northern Europe includes the poet’s home, Estonia. The harrier has laid three to eight eggs and she will sit on them for about thirty days. She is a fierce thing now rendered vulnerable. The crickets she hears are part of her diet, along with small birds, animals, frogs.

Similes and metaphors are other quick-moving live things in this field.

What does it mean to see a bird as a key that opens a door? I read this poem to a group of sixth graders and I ask them this question. A key lets you in, they say. It invites the speaker into the field. She felt locked out until she saw the bird.

But what is the room? And who is it who cannot fathom its space? We look up fathom. Fathom, n., the embracing arms. Or, a stretching of the arms in a straight line to their full extent. (As in wings on our human bodies.) Figurative: breadth of understanding. (As in wings spreading in our minds.)

The field exceeds our understanding? The field exceeds our grasp? We do not know the proper way to embrace this field? (Maybe humans have never learned how to fathom any field.)

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The marsh harrier (Circus aeruginosus) is this poem’s only silent bird, but you can listen to her call here.

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I love how ear-y this poem is. How much we hear before we see, the way a bird’s cry often reaches us long before we set eyes on it. If we set eyes on it. Like the seagull in the poem’s second section–a common bird, a bird ordinary as remorse, carrying her pelagic loneliness through the “peacock dusk.” The gull sounds “as if she carried the sea with her.” She must be Larus canus, the common Eurasian gull, whose cry smacks me in the kisser with its tang of salt. I don’t know if Paja is thinking of the eerie sea-mews of “The Wanderer” or “The Seafarer,” but it’s hard not to catch their echo here. Maybe that’s why this section feels so wintry.

When the gull’s wing-light covers the speaker—a singular “me” now, no longer the “we” of part one—it’s like an eggshell. Is that an image of comfort? Maternal protection, safety? (As safe as any egg in a nest on the cold hard ground.)

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Someone else made a wing diary.

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Wing diary? A twitcher’s stam-book? I love twitch slang. Like jizz, the totality of particulars demarking a single bird species. Once you know jizz, you start sensing giss, the interaction of body shape, movements, and behaviors letting you identify instantly and almost instinctively birds you’re familiar with. But you can’t guess by giss til you know sum plum, the birds’ summer plumage. Vis Mig: not a sighting of Russian fighter planes, just spotting some avian folk in their migration formation. (Although with so much Musk-y stuff in the skies these days, what you’re spotting if you’re near Boca Chica might be, on closer look, a nottabird.)

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Like to the lark at break of day arising, hearing a bird changes your inner weather.

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In the poem’s third section, another astonishing metaphor. The wind of early spring melts the ice on a frozen lake. And then a herald appears as if from off-stage (in the wings): the crane, Grus grus, with its voice like another kind of roaring water. Her howl “floods the leaf floor.” (I can see this forest floor in my mind. Nothing is green yet. The ground is a damp mess of last year’s leaf-wreck. The dusks have begun lengthening, but the light still has the pinched and wincing feel of a freshly-picked chilblain.)

Now, piercing, the crane’s howl overhead reminds us that time is moving.

And how many cranes there are! It’s one of the earliest signs of warming weather, this “strangest river” of migrating birds “singing the sky-path.” Along the northward flyway back to their breeding grounds, half the world’s population of Eurasian cranes passes over Western Europe.

Cranes are famous for more than their migratory stamina. With a sure naturalist’s touch, Paja ends her poem with a “we”—reunited again— who will sleep together in a blue house below the voices of birds legendary for both their monogamous partnering and their glorious mating dance.