When I was a child, I often searched the sky for rainbows and the meadows for 4-leaf clover, two things that never satisfied me – the former were never as bright as I had anticipated, the latter never showed up. Now I don’t hunt for the transcendent, preferring to be ambushed by my thrills, like the kind evoked so vividly in the poem I’m presenting today: the sight of birds gathered by the hundreds, even thousands, swooping in rapturous patterns that alter with a speed and beauty that make you catch your breath. Angie Estes’ poem “I Want to Talk About You” alludes to John Coltrane’s performance of that Billy Eckstine song (there are several recordings of live performances by Coltrane of that tune; you can find some on YouTube). What I love about this poem, which first appeared in New Ohio Review 7, Spring 2010, is not only its apt comparison of the birds’ manic patterning and Coltrane’s transcendently changeable melodic and extramelodic flights, but also Estes’ gorgeous linguistic swelling and ebbing, mimetic of Coltrane’s cadenza. She is one of the few contemporary poets whose lines make you glad to be a native English speaker. Think of how many poets “adore Hopkins” but whose work shows no evidence of loving the language! His poems insist we do. As for the starlings, though one can’t be certain they are at play, there is an abandon in their flight-jamming that truly makes them look, as a jazz musician would say, “real gone.”
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I WANT TO TALK ABOUT YOU
when starlings swell over Otmoor, east of Oxford, as the afternoon
light starts to fade. Fifty flocks of fifteen to twenty starlings, riffraff
who have spent the day foraging in fields and gardens suddenly rise
like a blanket tossed into the sky, a revelling that molts sorrows to roost
rows, roost rows to sorrows as they soar through aerial corridors and swerve
into the shape of a cowl that lengthens to a woolen scarf wrapping
and wrapping, nothing at the center but throat: thousands of single black notes
surge into a memory called melody, the lovers damned but driven on
by violent winds in the cold season when starlings’ wings bear them
along in broad and crowded ranks, extended cadenzas to pieces that
never get played, brochure for the flared tip that begins with the tongue
and lips of the embouchure wrapping the saxophone’s slurred
howl, scrawled signature of the sky. Thousands fly but never collide
in their pre-roost ritual, Dante’s long list of God’s works excited
raked left and right over leafless branches of trees until they
drop like the bodies of suicides, draped on thorns of the wild
thickets their cast-off souls become, unable to rise the way a wave
nearing shore will crest, something on the tip of its tongue
thrown back before it breaks and splays, starlings laid down
like the wave’s rain of sand or words falling
out of a sentence: art slings, we called them, grass lint, snarl gist, gnarls
sit. Art slings them this way, last grins, art slings swell, rove
over, red rover, red rover, send artlings right over, artlings
rove, moor to swell, write Otmoor all over
after John Coltrane
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The complicated emotional swings in this poem veer swiftly from rapturous (“reveling that molts sorrows”) to nearly suicidal. Perhaps it will help to give some context to the italicized line after “lovers damned but driven on/by violent winds”: here is the passage from Dante’s Inferno that contains it, which Estes appears to have drawn from Allen Mandelbaum’s translation:
And as, in the cold season, starlings’ wings
bear them along in broad and crowded ranks,
so does that blast bear on the guilty spirits:
now here, now there, now down, now up, it drives them.
There is no hope that ever comforts them –
no hope for rest and none for lesser pain.
And just as cranes in flight will chant their lays,
arraying their long file across the air,
so did the shades I saw approaching, borne
by that assailing wind, lament and moan. . . (Inf. V, 40-49)
Angie Estes is the author of four books, most recently Tryst (Oberlin Univ. Press, 2009) which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her earlier poetry collections are Chez Nous (2005), and Voice-Over (2002), and The Uses of Passion (1995). She teaches at Oklahoma State University.
See you next week with another gem from the archives of this young magazine. (JAR)
