244 PA RT T W O
window-wings. Was this poem the one being written when the pencil stopped,
or another? Maybe human stillness, sensuously eyeing thin spotted wings, soot-
tinted hairs, long black tongue, breeds full consciousness. “My eyes have been
primal from the very beginning,” says Swenson. Being nearsighted, “I look
at everything more carefully close up and notice details.” In George Oppen’s
“Psalm,” the deer’s “soft lips / Nuzzle” and “small teeth / Tear at the grass.”
Then just as his poem ends, “the wild deer / Startle, and stare out.” Between
stilling her pencil and finally stirring, Swenson’s craft arrests us for a few sec-
onds of sheer attentiveness.
In common with Dickinson, Swenson prized birds along with butterflies: “if I let
myself, every poem would have a bird in it.” An avid watcher who kept a life list
of sightings, she bent her gaze on everything from Anna’s hummingbirds to god-
wits, horned grebes, and the anhinga. Smaller but fiercer than a booby and flying
underwater, spearing fish on its beak, the anhinga or snakefish drives her into
reaches of language that wed Gerard Manley Hopkins with Marianne Moore:
Her cry,
a slatted clatter, inflates her chin-
pouch; it ’s like a fish’s swim-
bladder....
She flaps up to dry on the crooked, look-
dead-limb of the Gumbo Limbo, her tan-
tipped wing fans spread, tail a shut fan dangled.It ’s not—or not just—to fan her own wings that Swenson sounds like this. She
liked Dickinson’s “kinetic poetry” and allied herself with Hopkins, Clare, and
Roethke. Poems that catch “the full reality of something alive” are bringing
news that stays news.
For kinetic energy, take “The Willets,” a sexual dance that Swenson watched
in a Delaware salt marsh:
He stamp-danced closer, his wings arose,
their hinges straightened,
from the wedge-wide beak the thin sound
streaming agony-high...As for “She,”
The wings held off his weight.
His tail pressed down, slipped off. She
animated. And both went back to fishing.So birds and also “Bees waft and hum through an extraordinary number of
poems.” Swenson is speaking of Emily, and her poem “A Couple” could almost