BIRDS IN THE FREEZER

I was instantly angry when I saw Katrina van Grouw’s The Unfeathered Bird in the window of Labyrinth Books in Princeton. After all, had I not definitively nailed the subject of unfeathered birds in my poem with that title?

She was not only stealing my title but had expanded it into a coffee table art book. My poem had been published in 1987 in the magazine Abraxas in a spread with other poems by fellow birder Warren Woessner. Here is the true and  original Unfeathered Bird –

Without ever raising the question of circles, preferring the greater gravity of descent, the ease of downhill progress, what are we?

Less than fledgling, novices at our gorilla shape.

The anchor, in other words, going to its place, slips down the incline; the bones thicken in scale, from bird to man and down. A mood tumbles into a thing, a warbler, amplified to tuba.

          It’s the mechanism of not flying. We go along with our bones, ideas that companion a growing weight, sinkers racing to the bottom.

          The axeblade drives into the wood. Like the rain, we fall, tieclips, and matchbooks, and Chapsticks, and paperclips, and staples, and bottlecaps.

Birds crash into glass windows. I was sitting typing by a window in a cottage in the middle of Ontario when a robin crashed into that window. I finished the paragraph and went outside to see what happened to the bird. It was not merely dead; it was half-consumed by ground-dwelling bugs and mites. The skeleton was emerging.

Whole flocks of migrating birds are wiped out crashing into New York skyscrapers. At dawn one spring morning walking downtown to the Staten Island Ferry I encountered a dead flock of migrating warblers. I’m a mediocre birder and I did not recognize the species; -- hmm. I scooped one up and wrapped it in paper and went back to my apartment on Staten Island. I still didn’t know what it was and decided to postpone leafing through my bird books. Leaving the birdie in his wrapper, and put him the freezer and completely forgot about him.  And a month later Barbara Minsky said she was hungry, and went out to my kitchen and started puttering and  – screamed! Love never lasts.

Katrina van Grouw filled her freezer, and her mother’s freezer, and a sizable number of the freezers of friends with dead birds. She then dissected them and made wonderful paintings. Her The Unfeathered Bird is an  Anatomy for Birders. I’m pretty sure that van Grouw, before embarking on this project, did not read my book proposal Anatomy for Sports Fans. Man, if she did, I’m pissed all over again.

No, I’m not. If Katrina van Grouw did happen to come across my poem, and took the title unconsciously, I am honored. Her bird bones are as exquisite as Georgia O’Keefe’s skulls. Unfeathered is a word which occurs naturally to anyone wondering what makes a bird fly, or swim, or sing – or lay an egg. Feathered birds are the matter of field guides. You can tell a bird’s species by her arrangement of feathers. Birds don’t dress up their feathers for birders only, however. Seabirds, as van Grouw remarks, are countershaded. The feathers of the shearwater and albatross are white below. Fish looking up see nothing but the sun. They are dark above. Airbound hunters lose them in the  wine-dark waves.

Birds feed at dusk and dawn. Their hours are brief.