In the winter morning, it – the light – starts to transmit in a particular way. Looking east through the back Bay Window, it’s in the pigeon’s wings; the sun not yet risen, a smallish lit gray behind Portrero Hill, the flocks – between a dozen to thirty birds - begin to rise in a continuously unfolding geometry, streaming back and forth in cylindrical twists, at first a series of tightly rounded, then gradually elongated patterns of figure-eights, the flight pattern dipping up and down - their wings tilted up at about 30 degrees – momentarily gliding, elevated high over the roofs of the neighborhood. It’s in the tilt and upward lift that one can see the first light: the dirty, pearl gray-white under the birds’ otherwise dark wings, the way it reflects back the initial illumination of the rising sun.
Figure eights. The figure for infinity underpinned by these flashing and subtle, pockets of light.
Curious in this City where many despise pigeons, and those who do not are the stuff of legend: aging eccentrics who carry birdseed in hidden brown paper bags, say, under an overcoat, or inside a used white plastic shopping bag, either of which are discreetly opened up to toss seeds on to anonymous concrete street corners, or, alternatively, on to the poop-stained sidewalk under the wooden eves and plinths of a singularly unoccupied, ill-painted, aging Victorian.
Rarely does anyone speak of the light from under the birds’ wings. One is more likely to hear or take offence at the bird’s arrogance. The way one bird will startle you as it’s wing grazes the side of your shoulder – flying quickly and unexpectedly down from a porch railing to peck at seed or loose twig in the gutter, while interrupting what one might have assumed a confident entitlement to stroll forward, unimpeded down a sidewalk. Or, just as obnoxiously the way another bird will sit in the middle of the street, totally unconcerned about an on-coming car, only deigning, and never failing, to get out of the vehicle’s path by a mere second. More off-putting is the white & black colored poop that drips in permanent streaks down, for example, the teal-green fresh painted sideboards of an otherwise monumentally beautiful Victorian residence. The fecal acids cut through the short lived virginity of any new paint job, and that’s not to talk about the birds’ fresh splats on clean car windshields, or the tops of “just washed” car roofs, hoods and trunks.
Equally irritating, or even nerve wracking to many - in spring and summer - is the constant, promiscuous cooing of pigeons surrounding one’s home, a time during which the ever-present birds mate and build nests inside chimneys, on gravel flat roofs and atop wooden eves. It’s not an urban fertility rite that gives birth to joy as the little birds crack through eggs to mature and expand the local flocks. Quite the contrary. In fact, a gray flock filling the sidewalk - or perched in a double line on wires between a set of telephone poles - is more likely to signal the low edges of an oncoming depression, especially in the summer, when the birds alternately appear and disappear, in and out of the mostly thick, gray fog.
Actually, for many, nothing in the City quite matches the public’s contempt for the birds. Yet they are not banished. Perhaps the birds’ unchecked freedom is an odd holdover from the late nineteenth century, a guilt for when Passenger Pigeons were a prized delicacy, an abundant meat, affordable to both rich and poor. That was a time when immense flocks - ones whose migrations would eclipse the sun to throw huge shadows across the American landscape – were slaughtered, much similar to the decimation of the country’s buffalo and forests, until the last passenger pigeon was killed in 1897, the breed exterminated all in a space of forty years. Parallel to the situation of American Indian reservations, one might suspect the entire world has informally declared the City as a refugee center and protected reservation for the pigeon. With the bird’s origins - once commonly known as a “Rock Dove” - in the mountains and rocky crags of Northern Europe and transported across the ocean by early pioneers, eventually the crossed arms of urban telephone poles, overhead wires, the ledges of building became the safest, most compatible home.
Of course, there are contrarians that would do most anything to rid the City of what some homeowners commonly call the “flying rat”, an even lower status than the Canadian goose as the “flying pig.” Yet, as someone pointed out, for every six birds the public might kill with a gun, or pesticide application, another six would be simultaneously born. Progressive approaches, at best, argue a nutritional program of white rice. Legend has it that clears pigeon poop of destructive acids, and also, apparently, creates a less offensive mix of gray and white colors.
Yes, one rarely hears praise for a flock’s flight pattern, or even a profile view of the sometimes beautiful, iridescent plum and jade colors around a singular pigeon’s throat, nor the warm appearing compatibility of a pigeon couple – perhaps a rare set with light brown feathers - pressing their white breasts together as they perch isolated on a Victorian building’s upper ledge. Such confessions are few, rarely public, and usually the kind of insights and sentiments reserved for well-bred, recently washed, groomed and manicured dogs on parade or at play in the City’s Parks. As a close friend preferred to point out, “Have you ever looked at a pigeon’s claws? Rarely do they have a full set, several of them are either partially or fully amputated”. It’s as if something about looking at a pigeon is much more likely connected to the darkest recesses in one’s soul, those imploded and broken places, preferably hidden, rarely exposed.
It is also true there are magnificent aesthetic exceptions, particularly the parrots from Peru and Ecuador. In my neighborhood perhaps two-dozen of them make a mostly invisible perch between the green fronds in the Palms lined up and down Dolores Street, as well as singular Palms sporadically found in backyards. An unmistakable shrill, vibrating trill sound fills a flock anytime it moves from one Palm to another; often they take what seem extraordinarily high, circular trajectories, their chartreuse and lemon-yellow bodies lit by a slice of sunlight. Once arriving at a destination Palm, it’s minutes before they go quiet from insistent chatter, or, again rise, similarly loud, to move en groupe to yet another Palm. In the early Eighties, when the birds first arrived in the neighborhood, young men had begun to die from AIDS in great number. Rumors were that some of those who died owned the exotic parrots as pets; when they passed, their roommates released the birds out of their cages, out the door or window and into the local sky. As the birds chattered and appeared to fly both homeless and desperate, they gradually gathered into flocks with others of their own kind. It became easy, perhaps, to gain the impression that these new orphan flocks were the carriers of young souls, those young men who had lost their bodies, but were entirely unwilling to entirely leave their neighborhood. The shrill calls took on the character of an intense kind of community gossip, the sounds one might make if one’s spirit was compressed into a body too small.
This morning, for whatever reason, I am thinking of the connection between City poets and City pigeons, particularly this City with its worldwide reputation as a nesting ground for poets, including the occasion for the act of writing, and sometimes performance of major poems. Poets not necessarily despised as much as pigeons, though that sometimes too, but, certainly, similar in the way of great amounts of time spent in a hovering state, a life suspended between visible and obscure, one way or other, surviving amongst a larger public, one most often not quite sure what to do with characters who often appear, by most standards, to be useless – men and women, young to old, who sit either withdrawn at home or in coffee shops, an attention rapt to the text of a poetry book, or, head tilted down, pushing a pen across pages in a blank journal, as if in a state of constant practice; if not, jabbering, sometimes obnoxiously “grousing” or breaking into spontaneous private or shared laughter with other similar figures, or, alternatively, occasionally seen as singular figure, walking alone through a City park or up and down the hills, eyes either tightly focused on one particular object after another, or, in an opposite state, where the eyes drift off as in a dream, while sometimes, with each step, in what may or may not be a new poem’s rehearsal, a barely audible monolog appears to meander off the lips.
Indeed, unlike lawyers with clients or doctors with patients where both professions feature “billable hours”, there is no real way to measure the poet’s time and worth, especially “down time”, when days, months, even years pass when no writing occurs and the person once proudly identified as a poet becomes something comparable to the ghost of one, the bare shade of a public memory: a book once published, now out of print, the think spine, barely visible on the shelves of friends and, maybe, relatives. Sympathetic souls might hope if only a poet were as publicly and seasonally prolific as pigeons, one could then measure the works’ value and use; yet even then, it may still not be possible to know the works’ real worth, at least, not immediately. A good or great poem might sit in a journal like an egg – or parts of an egg – for years before a good hatch. Generation after generation of poets – some who have written great or important poems – have arrived in the City to practice, or be quiet, and wait.
Indeed, this phenomenon - this hovering cross between uselessness and bouts of high-flying productivity - often drive the City and poet to the edge of craziness. Strangely similar to the gray Albatross in “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner”, the City’s need for the poet is a constant presence, night and day, as if trailing the City’s Psyche, promising the birth of something wanted, something that no one has yet been able to imagine or say, all this afternoon, for example, the way one is mainly conscious of the singular rows of pigeons, each perched on parallel high-rise wires between telephone poles; gray and static, the birds look like they could sit forever, only the occasional wing momentarily arched-up, looking down or beyond the street’s pedestrians, both public and pigeons living in a mutual world of a little curiosity about one another, more likely a shared contempt, or, at best, a snub-like tolerance while, in truth, both bird and poet play out this daunting wait, the moment of flight.
Yet, as sure and as astonishing as the doves’ early morning flights, the City’s poems keep rising. Yet, unlike the predictable timing of the risen or, the similar high flying, circling bird formations one can also see in early Fall afternoons - when the air cools and the white under-wings reflect and flicker the diminishing light – the poem’s emergence appears to follow no time table. What is similar is the sudden burst, the unaccountable and comparable sweeping rise of birds and the poem (the words), as in a dream of being drawn off the ground by an enormous wind into a transcendent “God knows where” flight, or, as if being pulled uncontrollably under and up into the forward, rising curve and thrust of an ocean tidal wave. Yes, the act of giving into the poem and its unpredictable emergence, is something roughly comparable; the poet – well practiced and ready – the lines across the page instantly emerging, forming and reforming: the illuminations riveted dispatches reflected back into the City, celebrating the most plain to it darkest recesses.
For the entirely uninitiated – wittingly or not, in the grip of the myth of the poet in the City – it’s probably important to say some names, at least those of the elders whose poems and lives have given rise to the imaginative depths of this still young City. In a list that leaves out many, without doubt one can say Kenneth Rexroth, George Oppen, Robert Duncan, Helen Adam, Robin Blaser, Jack Spicer, Philip Lamantia, Philip Whalen, Diane DiPrima, David Meltzer, Michael McClure, Allan Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Bob Kauffman, Victor Hernandez Cruz, Beverly Dahlen, Robert Gluck, Michael Palmer, Ron Silliman, and Barrett Watten. If one reads their works closely, various traces of the City are inseparable from the fractures of wind, light and clouds on the colors of the hills, buildings, the parks and the Bay, as well as - turning it inside out - making visible what is private, the nocturnal dreams, the ghosts and nightmares of a history, the invisible beings that shape the flights of an imagination, what keeps one’s poem and wings tilting, no different than the birds, responding to the present, to argue, shift and shape into new lines, new formations, the reconfiguration of myth in an inerrant commitment to illumination and disclosure. Again and again, as sure as the early morning hydraulic whining of the scavenger trucks, the City’s vision is cleansed. Yes, in the same way the elder makers rapidly or gradually disappear, the young and the new are always challenging, emergent.
What can one say? Ultimately, the poet’s ecstasy and loss, the perpetual return to waiting – perhaps the plight of all makers - one might say, no different than the working couple in the night club, exhausted at week’s end, out on the dance floor, winging their bodies into the slow and beautiful crest of a Tango, delineated under a dusty beam of light in the otherwise shadows, “poetry, a terrible profession, a beautiful life.”
Stephen Vincent
February 2004