Leveler Poetry Journal
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January (or Winter Bird Dream)                                                    



Birds refuse to fly when it rains.


They prefer to remain on the ground


hopping in place resting on soft space.                                           




She knew the way to attract them


was to line her window boxes         


with sterile white cotton. 

Surgical


cotton rolled like a small bale of hay.




The cotton glistened like peaks


of egg  whites and new snow.


Here the birds could wait out the rain                    




yet be ready for flight—their impulse


ignited whenever the sun

returned.                    



The longer the rainy season, the less


they remembered how to fly.                                   



When the woman died and it was time      


to sort through her things,

We found a closet

filled


with brown wrapped boxes.



We could hear scratching along                  


the stiff box tops and wings pushing


along the sides of the swaying stacks.                     
             



The lid once lifted

revealed


red, blue and yellow wings


piercing through the batting.




Bluejays, cardinals,

finches

were asleep, dreaming,

they were flying.




Millie Falcaro

levelheaded: January (or Winter Bird Dream)


Like it or not, life goes on as people fall dead around us. The world keeps turning, as they say. If there is an accident on the highway, you can bet most everyone who isn’t involved will be scratching and clawing their way past the blockades and police lights turned on in its aftermath. It isn’t that people don’t sympathize, but our instinctual gusto to live, to remain fully alive while barreling past graveyards and flashing neon signs that say “Bridge out ahead!,” is pretty tough to quiet. This, perhaps, is the subtle overarching message of Millie Falcaro’s “January (or Winter Bird Dream).” It is a poem about death, but it is also about a kind of survival only possible through imagination. One of the very things that sets us apart as a species (or not?) from the rest of life on earth—our ability to imagine and create art—also holds at bay each of our complete individual disappearances from the planet.


The poem begins as a straightforward narrative about a woman who attracts birds by placing nesting materials in her planters. It is a bucolic scene wherein the cotton she uses is “rolled like a small bale of hay” and “glisten[s] like peaks of egg whites and new snow.” If idealization is akin to simplification, here it seems we have both. But this is not merely a comment on the innocence of the woman or the beauty of the birds. Instead, as the speaker’s observations move quietly from fact to fantasy, we learn to see this idealization as a part of the speaker’s own manifestations—a product, not of the reality of the woman, but of what remains in the speaker.


The “it was time” in the line, “When the woman died and it was time,” makes the subtle but morbid assertion that there is a time allotted for each of our deaths. It is a phrase that can be heard whispered in funeral parlors. It is a consolatory phrase for the living. It is an admission of belief in serendipity, in a universal balance of pain and pleasure, good and evil. Here again we sense an Ecclesiastical (or if you prefer, a Seegeresque) idealization of the human life cycle. At this very moment, the moment of the woman’s death in the poem, the speaker shifts from the third-person into a first-person oriented around a “we.” On doing so, the narrative we may have initially taken as observational fact is undercut by the realization that we are together with the speaker under a shroud of unreality. The subdued “white” and “brown” of the poem gives way to the “red, blue, and yellow wings / piercing through the batting” and finally we see the impossible image of “Bluejays, cardinals, / finches / […] asleep, dreaming, / they were flying.” This last image is of primary importance to the poem because the birds are not dreaming of driving cars or mowing a lawn, but of flying—something perfectly realistic, but something that, like the poem, must be dreamt into existence.



– The Editors