I carry it in a side pocket of my mind specifically for mornings like this one - late February, a hint of color on the horizon but mostly a monochrome morning. In his poem, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” poet Wallace Stevens explores the surprisingly intricate terrain of the commonplace, reminding us of the complexity of even the simpliest of things, like, for instance, a black bird on just such a morning as this.
“Among twenty snowy mountains,/ The only moving thing/ Was the eye of the blackbird.” I sit in the snow at the edge of the lake, watching a trio of black birds spiraling in from the somewhere of their morning to land in the tree just beside me. The branches bend slightly under their feathered weight.
“I was of three minds,/ Like a tree/ In which there are three blackbirds.” They tip toe among the branches of the birch as easily as morning thoughts - resting, fluttering, sipping the morning air. I take a breath of that same air.
How often we ignore the comings and goings of common birds. Too often, they leave no tracks on our mind. So this morning, I will myself to be attentive, to sit silently, and think of that poem. “It was snowing/ And it was going to snow./ The blackbird sat/ In the cedar-limbs.” In the quiet of the morning, I could hear the snowflakes brushing against my hood, the soft rustlings of the birds in the branches.
“I do not know which to prefer,/ The beauty of inflections/ Or the beauty of/ innuendoes,/ The blackbird whistling/ Or just after.”
We sat a long time together, those black birds and I. It was just a moment. Just a morning. Nothing earth-shattering or soul-quaking but the point of the poem and of such mornings is, to me at least, sometimes that is enough. And then as if on a signal I could not be a part of, they flew soundlessly away. “When the blackbird flew out of sight,/ It marked the edge/ Of one of many circles.”
I waited until they were out of sight and then got up and circled back towards the car. The only tracks in the snow were my own.
— Jeff Rennicke (all photography by the author unless otherwise noted).
If you would like to read the Wallace Stevens poem in its entirety, click below.