tapestry

Now we have a fourth dimension, with the onset of spring. The birds and their songs have grown from the singular, the pointed, the individual crow or jay or chickadee to a thing so consistent it becomes a layer. A quality of our surroundings that provides information, perspective, orientation. What has it been called? A choir of song – it is also a blanket, a ceiling, a shower. The other cliché is a tapestry, but we’d have to parce it out to see how it fits.

At first thought, it doesn’t seem quite right, a tapestry of birdsong. A tapestry is a still thing, a decorative thing, which the springing of birds is not. But it has the weaving right. Yesterday morning two cardinals perfectly timed their whoit-whoiting to make me imagine them carrying threads in their beaks, flitting over, under, over, under to the end of the loom. What would a tapestry of cardinal song look like? Some great, crimson, textured herringbone, perhaps. But like an illustrative tapestry, individual pictures arise amidst patterns, colors. Chickadees interrupt the tea-kettling song sparrows, and hairy woodpeckers drum underneath phoebes. It is a many-textured but constant endeavor, to weave the morning.

I think to gain the full effect of song-tapestry, we have to go beyond the ordinary. Birdsong in spring becomes a geographical story, an audible map, an unrolling scroll as you stroll through microclimates. We start in the upland, with chickadees and nuthatch (yes, usually just one of them), and move to the rolling lawn twenty yards away, with briar thickets that hold the song sparrows. Then to river’s edge, and dogwood and big decaying cottonwoods, to hear the woodpeckers. Further along, come floodplain, the phoebes, the same every morning with their raspy two-note song. I know I’m moving again to the small hardwood stand in the park when I hear cardinals, and chickadees again. The robins scatter, shouting their woodpeckerish chatter as they fly from the baseball field, and I know I’ve made it to the juniper stand by the old cemetery when it’s grackles and starlings, all squawking and hollering. 

The only tapestry I can think of that displays this kind of color, texture, story, and knowledge is the great one in Bayeux, holding history and conquest.  As you walk its length a world unfolds. But even that is faded, which today’s songs are not. There are no metaphors, really, not for spring.