Reading Jean-Christophe Bailly’ The Animal Side, I find this lovely passage about watching a murmur of starlings:
‘ . . . one evening on the Loire and over a period of hours, the perpetual movement of a flock of starlings endlessly forming liquid figures, a triangulation of black dots departing, then suddenly turning back like iron filings attracted by an invisible magnet moving in the sky. Nothing more, perhaps: only flight, the idea of flight, embodied in flight as we see it and as it comes and goes before our eyes – and precisely as if there were in it, in its very dependence and in its pure effect of law, of a law actualized, a condensation of what is not only free but truly liberated and activated in the sky, the signature of pure intoxication with living, in a singular and dreamy beat.’
So I dig out this sequence of photos I took three years ago, on the road from Perelada to Mollet, with the Alberas behind, and the starlings doing their thing, writing a poem on the sky.
That is so beautiful. Thank you for the gift of poetry. Dropped a jewel into a dull misty moisty day.
Birds Like Me
The starlings, I’ve noticed,
Follow me around;
They wait, restless and scratching,
In the eaves of my house,
Fly over my car,
Rest on nearby branches
At the red lights
All the way from Comox
To the air park
Where they perch high
In the aspen, all squeaky
With droid-like chirps and whistles
As I walk the loop.
On the way home, the pigeons
Never fail to nod
From their telephone wires
At Portuguese Joes,
Either at me or the starlings,
It’s hard to tell we’re so close,
Living this way.
Still, I greet the pigeons,
Shout compliments
To opalescent feathers
Through the open windows.
I say nothing of their clumsy flight,
Their jilted walk that reminds me of Christopher Walken–
Perhaps pigeons followed him around
And in time, my starlings will murmur poems
And I will learn to flow in perfect tandem
With birds like me.
Natalie Nickerson 2017