A Stranger Is an Animal Who Doesn’t Sing
BY BRIAN TEARE
“We read our history clearly
in the flight and cries of the bird.”
—Yannis Ritsos (trans. Spring Ulmer)
when it is time
to study hatred
again sparrows
gather bicker
in the forsythia
i tend like i tend
the life of the mind
its leafless thicket
a tangle of lines
other voices live in
i think i think
if i transcribe
enough sentences
in the notebook
i will find a form
that has a hate
i can tolerate
my first teacher
of poetry liked
to quote lowell
pity the monsters !
pity the monsters !
which pissed me off
it was the ’90s
my lover was dying
of AIDS too bad
he’s going to hell
my mother said
with all the others
i loathed pity
and monstrosity
as discourses
about politics
exerting power
over who lived
and who died
who was mourned
and who deserved it
by decade’s end
i earned two degrees
in the literature
of compulsory
heterosexuality
and still don’t know
if that was shelter
or injury or both
i still don’t know
what to do with
words that draw
calamity closer
as i write i hear
the house sparrows
i was taught
i had to tell apart
from song sparrows
and the several
finches who flock
without much song
i was also taught
to say hello
without judgment
to each thought
as it steps forward
sheer meaningless
thereness amidst
the mind’s bare
declaratives
hello now go
i write i say
to this midwinter
fact of existing
as long as each
moment presents
what happens
not so that
i awaken to
the excellence
of this life
yvonne rainer
writes but so
that i awaken
to the ways
i have been
taught this life
is excellent
just and right
this is one part
of the difficulty
another part
is the sparrows
i was taught to keep
from breeding
english sparrows
i was taught
to call them
invasive species
who in one season
produce three broods
and outcompete
cavity-nesting
native passerines
who produce fewer
i was also taught
to destroy their nests
and bar the birdhouse
entrance hole
until a bit later
in the season
when bluebirds
start nesting
which is what i did
despite believing
passer domesticus
a blameless form
the world thought
to take and keeps
on thinking
beaks adapted
to distinguish
seed from hull
upper mandible
lower mandible
my minds grinds
against itself
parenthetical
endlessly opening
continuous
shrill monotonous
noisy chirping
reads one guide
pretty shady
for ornithology
though david
allen sibley writes
in a tone i don’t
care for either
of monotonous
nearly identical
chirps in the realm
of emotion
house sparrows
get a lot of hate
and annoy people
for not singing
like john cage
who removed
both melody
and harmony
from his music
and wrote instead
with structure
and method
perhaps as queer
as zen gets
cheerfully severe
he asked listeners
to face attachment
to the pleasures
of received form
and adherence
to convention
by refusing them
reviews reflect
the fact some
resented that
antisocial turn
it was the cold war
the pink scare
the category is
straight people
having feelings
in the free world
the state spread
isolationist
affective textures
through citizens
who listened
against otherness
vigilant the way
they are today
no matter what
severely cheerful
cage enthused
that pure life
expresses itself
through structure
and wrote that
everybody has
a song that is
no song at all
i am not so nice
what can i write
about my past
ethnonationalist
birdhouse phase
when bluebirds
traded sweet
clipped whistles
with their fledgling
i was not proud
i started to feel
i had been taught
to save bluebloods
from what birders
like to call
little brown birds
and i totally did
i sit with this
for a long time
by which i mean
until it snows
for a long time
is a phrase i love
within it i feel
the world
without a self
fall into folds
like the sheets
in a signature
in a book
all pasts collapse
together a past
becoming my own
the way i read
that it is true
house sparrows
were introduced
to the U. S.
in brooklyn
in greenwood
in 1852
but it is not true
that the man
eugene schieffelin
who soon released
more sparrows
near his house
in madison square
wanted to populate
central park
with every bird
in shakespeare’s plays
an anxious nativist
at the american
museum of natural
history made that up
the truth is just this
bird some people liked
or believed useful
maybe they were kids
in other countries
and saw sparrows
make dust wallows
and loved the sight
and brought them here
without knowing
much about them
and found cheerful
what another guide
calls their incessant
tuneless cheeping
for one hundred
seventy three years
the bird has remained
nonnative invasive
a flexible symbol
in a long series
of constructions
government reports
scientific studies
satirical poems
moral editorials
and testy letters
citizens once sent
to newspapers
to complain about
immigrant finches
dissipated
urban-dwellers
rich in vices
wretched foreigners
feathered reprobates
lazy little louts
self-willed and violent
hard characters
full of impudence
and pugnacity
alien vermin
rowdy little gamin
disgusting exotics
fond of fighting
and love-making
stormy and ignoble
domestic tyrants
the little saxons
copulated freely
and scandalized
scientific men
of the period
stopwatches in hand
watched fourteen
successive bouts
of intercourse
at a rate of five
seconds per act
with five-second
intervals between
outrageous data
whose prurience
helped fuel
what historians call
the sparrow wars
that were never
really about birds
but homeland
biosecurity
the little animal
became a stranger
despite how like
men are birds
wrote whittier
thinking maybe
about fighting
or fucking like
scientific men
i was taught
to be skeptical
of equivalence
between nativism
and conservation
but what about
the model bird law
of 1886
promoted by
eugenicist
naturalists
and passed
by ten states
that legislated
the slaughter
of non-natives
or the sparrow
exclusion act
which though
it did not pass
was modeled
on the chinese
exclusion act
and argued
this sparrow is
to native birds
what yellow peril
is to human
immigration
the question
after all is who
is the enemy
and who is not
the current
reigning architect
of genocide
on television says
they are animals
like all previous
reigning architects
of genocide
performing
the consoling
fiction of fixed
identity in
the gender
ideologue
lip synch
elimination
competition
banal evil
invariably
whosoever
a nation-state
calls a stranger
a nation-state
calls an animal
because the state
can kill an animal
without qualm
to live with wrong
genocidal men
constantly talking
isabella hammad
suggests we live
between alignment
and alienation
alike and unlike
never quite at home
in the notebook
finding things out
and changing
with the needs
of sense-making
without linear
evolution
its limitation
is acceptance
of whatever
happens next
unsymbolic
wintry mix
falling here
on the object
realm of shadows
cupped in snow
shifting in wind
ever intimate
with the flock
shaking the bare
sentences where
come spring
yellow will speak
for itself
i look closely
to try to say
a given name
the question
being a short bib
above white belly
or a very streaky
onesie like that one
picking around
in the leaflitter
alone because
song sparrows
only flock in fall
i did not know that
i looked it up
as i close the book
the flock disappears
into the dark
blocky paragraphs
of the holly
i want to write
the way they move
though i was taught
in the mental realm
thoughts are clouds
the mind is water
i was also taught
i could not move
freely in a poem
because i’d learned
to shape its music
through exclusion
you couldn’t write
peanut butter
to save your life
said my first teacher
and he was right
though i did not
want to sing
i wanted to think
the way the world
thinks itself being
one teacher might
enforce tradition
another might
bring a sword
to cut off
all concepts
pretty aggressive
to undo
the habitual
movements
of the mind
and release
with mysterious
precision
an unknowing
worthy of this world
a tawny noise
the sparrow
is not a parable
thinking animal
speaking animal
fond stranger
waiting for spring
neither of us
will be singing
hello is the end
of the poem
hello now go
[ January 2025 ]
