Der Kleiber: Eurasian Nuthatch
(Sitta europaea)
… What’s the littlest thing
You can spin a poem out of … ?
Michael Schmidt
*
Over here there are enough trees
to make us feel sheltered.
We hear it first, a loud song:
the clear notes so sharp it makes us stop.
But there is no fear we think, no pain.
When we look up we see the bird:
tiny, unlikely.
You say it’s the only bird
that can descend trees headfirst.
The bird hovers. I say it might fly away.
This one has a blue-grey upper body
And orange-peach underparts.
We watch it climb higher and forage.
And then we hear it sing again.
We watch, not wanting to disturb it.
And yet, not wanting to leave.
There we stand, looking up, when suddenly
the bird moves down the tree, headfirst.
Unusually, this week’s poem is from a literary journal, not a collection. The journal, PNR, this month celebrates its distinguished 50th anniversary. PotW is pleased to add its own tribute with a new poem from the anniversary issue.
Der Kleiber: Eurasian Nuthatch is a deceptively simple poem. The diction is plain: there is no special figurative effort to conjure the bird and inventively dazzle the reader. The tone is not that of the celebratory nature poem. Its curtness might be on the edge of humour, but there are hints of greater disturbance under the surface. The speaker doesn’t reassure the reader with specificity of context: we don’t know where “over here” is located. Interviewed in Kunapipi, Bhatt described her reluctance to be geographically placed and fixed. The polylingual naming of the bird in the current poem’s title may be indicative. Does this connect with a particular need (line two) for the two people in the poem to “feel sheltered”? Why, in the next verse, although the implication is rejected, should the nuthatch’s loud call raise the possibility of fear or pain?
Visible, the bird’s reality seems not quite trusted: “tiny, unlikely” to the speaker’s eye, it’s almost not there. Perhaps distracted, the couple begin a conversation which doesn’t coalesce: the addressee, the poem’s “you”, explains about the bird’s proclivity for descending trees headfirst, and the speaker responds with anxiety: “I say it might fly away”. The scrap of dialogue is cleverly done, suggesting that each might want to say something else altogether, or, perhaps more likely, that the speaker would have preferred her companion to say nothing at all.
Then the ambiguity dissolves in the poem’s observations of the bird’s colouration. The colours are typical of nuthatch plumage, but singled out as characteristics particular to “this” bird. “This one has a blue-grey upper body / and orange-peach underparts.” The precision of the colour-description gives these two lines a gentle, conclusive glow. Like the speaker, the poem seems calmed by the moment of concentration. At last, the anxious surface settles.
In another of Bhatt’s poems, The Swan Princess Speaks, the narrator declares “I wanted to be everything: / a girl and a swan. I wanted to be free / to be a bird at home in any land, / at home on water and in the air.” Although the tone and style of Der Kleiber: Eurasian Nuthatch are quite different from the impassioned, wounded mythologising of The Swan Princess Speaks, perhaps the simple bird-as-itself also represents versatility and freedom, being the natural inhabitant of two elements, the air and the earth-rooted trees.
Sharing indecision about what further movements they can risk without scaring the bird, the couple seems to achieve a stilled unity – “There we stand, looking up”. It’s as if they’d forgotten any expectations about nuthatch behaviour and were simply lost in looking. But it’s then that “the bird moves down the tree, headfirst.”
At this point, we might remind ourselves of the epigraph (from Michael Schmidt’s A Bright Jewel in An Aethiope’s Ear). And we might ask ourselves if the poem itself is about finding “the littlest thing / you can spin a poem out of” or, indeed, the process of writing itself. Der Kleiber: Eurasian Nuthatch appears to be simple documentary rather than word-spinning. It’s not in search of an epiphany, and yet, perhaps for that very reason, it finally earns one.
• Sujata Bhatt’s latest poetry collection is Poppies in Translation.
