Bird at the Window
Elaine M. Seaman
Bird at the Window
If I were more primitive, or even religious,
I would have looked for omens in what I’ve seen
in the dead, gloriously red cardinal
that hit two windows before it dropped
to the deck, or in the dead robin
on the front porch in still February,
the wrong place, a very wrong time,
or in this stunned junco curled in the planter,
lifeless now, just weeks from heading north.
I would have anticipated the message
from my niece
that my sister was back in the hospital,
would not be going on our sisters’ trip
to Vegas, would stay in her robe
while we drink gin in smoky casinos.
But the sky is a surprising blue
with enough sunshine to outline tree limbs
in the grass like maps of rivers,
this one leading by switch and hitch
to the north, this one to the west.
So clear I could follow,
take the hint.
So much hope written dark.
ISBN 1-59661-141-3
61 pages/$9
The traditional quilt titles Seaman uses to name many of the poems in her collection bind her two art forms By the end of Bird at the Window, the importance of family is established, made more poignant by each passing. “Each time is the worst that can happen,” from “Churn Dash” describes the emotional steeling necessary to prepare for loss. And my favorite line from the title poem, “So much hope written dark,” nudges us to that place where quilts are most often used, beds where, even with others, we are alone. Seaman’s poems are comfort without a pillow, the hard place that if we live, we must get used to. Her quilter’s eye surveys the landscape in search of patterns, not just beauty.
—Elizabeth Kerlikowske
author of Shape of Dad, Before the Rain, Her Bodies and Dominant Hand
These skillful poems of Elaine’s stay close to home, inviting us into scenes with undertones, complex feelings—a brother home from Vietnam who never speaks of his time there, “no medals, no stories,” our speaker who offers a “..rage sale” with plenty of anger to go around, parents dismantling the railroad town a son created and left in the basement. A mother’s head is tilted slightly in her coffin “as if she wants to hear Myron’s last joke.” Husband and wife here tend to have edgy relationships. Two birds hitting the window are “like when divorce / spits on our table / and you and I duck down / to the floor boards, / neither one sure / which way to run.” But in another poem the lovers’ fingers touched and “we watched the miniature suns on the waves / as they washed toward our shore. Who / could help but applaud such balance?” Glimpses lifted out of our ordinary lives and presented artfully.
—Conrad Hilberry,
author of Sorting the Smoke, Player Piano, After-Music, and others
These are poems built upon the details of ordinary life—everyday dishes, cornfields, headscarf, pie. Yet in her deft hands, with an exquisitely light touch, the commonplace is transformed into something devotional, extraordinary. The speakers of these poems crave simplicity. “One ceramic cup. One bunk. / One friendly calico cat,” but discover that the touch of a hand can make the whole planet vibrate. Seaman’s world is one in which “mosquitoes and ghosts,” the natural and the spiritual, exist in tandem, where simple pockets become “caves…where private selves [are] kept with the Kleenex.” Indeed, there is something private here, reserved, a mystery not easily given up. I trust these poems because they know that the vastness of love and grief cannot be tidied “by lining up words into fields / of straight, dark rows,” in which even hope is “written dark.” And I trust this poet because she knows all the shades of green, from sassafras to artemesia to the “one summer goldfinch alight in the ash.”
—Diane Seuss,
author of It Blows You Hollow and Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open, winner of the 2009 Juniper Prize
for Poetry
Elaine M. Seaman (née Koren) grew up in Iowa. She lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where she taught quilting for many years. The National Quilter’s Museum in Paducah, Kentucky, has one of her quilts in its collection, as do many private collectors. Her first collection of poetry, Rocks in the Wheatfield, was published in 2004.