Spring songs

I have been listening all week. Listening to students, listening to birds. The birds have surprised me. (Some of the students surprised me too.)

All week, when I listened outside, I heard a song that drowned out all the others. It was a song of four notes. High low not so high and lower. I heard it at home on the southwest side of the county, and I heard it at school on the southeast side. On Friday, at last, after hearing it all week, I saw the singer. It was a Carolina Chickadee. All week I thought I was listening to an exotic warbler. I know the Chickadee's call. Chickadee dee dee. The bird who schooled me was at my house. As I watched him on a branch of the five year old redbud tree, I saw that he stretched himself up to his tallest profile and poured everything he had into his elongated throat. How could a Chickadee look so big? He was big with song.

I cannot look at a Chickadee ever again without thinking of my mentor, Eva Touster, who put a line in one of her poems, "My own, the tiny Carolina Chickadee." She taught me Ransom and Tennessee Williams. She taught me Oedipus the King and myself. I understand why she would think of a bird as her own, when the glimpse of its passion is so intimate and so fleeting. Everything I learned from her was like that, hard to hang onto and reverberating endlessly.