Still Life with Starlings and Man
by Sean Hill
“ … But since they shipped us across the water
it’s as if I should be grateful I’m imported … ”
Gudtyme
“Musica Negra (Black Music)”
X-Pressions
Every composition has elements,
and so my driving
up to the ATM at the Wells
Fargo off Paul Bunyan Drive
and finding a mother
European starling and her
two fledglings on the few yards
of grass between me and Paul Bunyan
Drive makes us,
to me, some kind
of composition. She forages
to feed them, and they watch
and imitate, the way
a lot of learning takes place,
picking up bits
of litter with their mouths
to see what’s actually
edible, one looks of innocence
with a candy wrapper in its bill
before dropping it to accept
food from mother, rictus
at her approach,
that instinctual gape,
and since I’ve initiated
the transaction, the ATM,
having accepted
my card, beeps at me
for more attention
and I peck my PIN and can’t
help watching
the starlings.
What are they doing
there? I remember their
ancestors were brought
to America for some
purpose like mine.
Schieffelin imported 60 in 1890
brought them to Central
Park to be released, not quite
manumitted, though
it’s from the Latin for
to send forth from
the hand the way I
imagine
Noah sent the raven
and the dove out into
the world
made new.
Eugene Schieffelin,
a member of the American
Acclimatization Society,
sought to better this country
by bringing over
bits of Britannia, in his case
specifically all the birds
mentioned in all the works
of Shakespeare. The work of such a
society runs counter
to my sense of things. I want
to keep this North Star State,
this Land of Ten Thousand
Lakes inclement so I’ll have
a home to yearn for.
But with “starling” uttered only once
in all of Shakespeare’s words,
Schieffelin’s starlings’ progeny proliferated
on this continent immortalizing
him only a little, not like the Bard
whose words fly and brighten
or blacken the sky. Today these fledglings’
bills gape and that wedge of air,
the absence they wait to have filled,
like the piece of cheese missing from
the wheel in a Dutch still life, a table
and banquet piece, with pheasant
and roemers—I see it as if it has to be,
though I can’t be sure
I’ve seen it—but it’s startling.
Those importers, seeking to improve
this land, had other projects. The ring-necked pheasant
with its red eye patch surrounded
by a glinting field of green deeper than kudzu
back home, which threatens
virid oblivion to the landscape—groves,
gullies, old buildings, all gone
under a blanket of kudzu like snow
here in the still months, a dreamer’s
topiary garden in the giant land of my
childhood. I’m always Jack hoping
for a happy ending the way Noah
hoped when he sent forth the dove a second
time for news of the world
and Schieffelin when he sent forth starlings
into the New World to make it over, to make
it Old and happily ever after.
Nostalgia’s a small act
of thievery from the here and now
and even the Geographic Cure can’t
rehabilitate us, won’t heal us, and here we are
marooned on subtle shores, deserted
for our crime—leaving home. Here if folks
are lucky and have lined their nests properly
they grow into snowbirds and come fall
migrate to warmer climes.
They follow the flight of geese, a skein
the same as the word for a hank
of yarn like a story spun, woven
like weft thread with a shuttle over
and under the warp, undulating
the way vessels on waves do
carrying cargo to and fro over
the ocean to weave us together.
The flock’s formation, a wedge,
pointing south, where the wedge
and maul wait behind the house
for my father or me, when I arrive,
to rend wood, that is cleave, the same
as the word when breathed that holds
fast as we do in our absence, one
from the other. The maul’s head
kept in place a by small wedge
forced into a smaller space.
Geese alternate wingbeats,
passing back lift, to buoy
each other on their long journey.
I wonder what moves a murmuration
of starlings spilling like sheets billowing on
clotheslines or water tripping on stones in gullies
after rain or the grain of the palm of Dad’s hand and wood
in the ark Noah built or words spilt from person
to person like the chatter of a flock of starlings
before they light out on their flight roiling
like the heart of a Maroon dreaming she’s
in a barracoon again before waking to the green
of the forest in the mountains and in that forest
the tint of US legal tender spit from the ATM,
regurgitated currency, 20’s stacked like the 20 Africans
a Dutch ship brought
to Jamestown in 1619—traded them
for provisions, one year before the Mayflower;
by 1817 the American
Colonization Society was founded
to send surplus negroes, that is free
Blacks, to Africa—to Liberia,
a place where a Black man could realize
his potential, a solution
for the free Black problem in
the United States—a white
nation.
The Dutch boat that brought
those Africans,
a small drop in the swell
of mercantilism
evidenced by the market
for still lifes
among the burgeoning middle class
of 17th century Holland.
Still lifes with roemers
of waldglas,
wide wineglasses with decorative
prunts,
dollops of glass
pressed into their thick stems, for greasy fingers to grip
for folks to sip wine at feast tables if these roemers
weren’t in still lifes
in which you can see the way light
lingers in wine and glass
and surface holds more
than brushstrokes.
In this particular banquet
piece, Still Life with Oysters and Grapes
by Jan Davidsz de Heem, he has brushed
the way light plays
on the slick of oysters
and the bloom of grapes,
that delicate grey
powdery matter that fogs their skin; he’s
rendered these globes variegated
with hues from green to gold to blue and red
hanging off the table;
the oysters
slide off the silver charger, and
caterpillars crawl and butterflies light
on the leaves
of vines hanging
onto the grapes and
the leafy and slight branch
clinging to the orange, because the branch
is not clinging to a tree,
in a candlestick
(or maybe it’s a salt cellar)
shining. The artist
found the reds of the hummingbird’s gorget
that I saw at the flowers—forsythia or jasmine,
no, fuchsia—outside Lauren’s mother’s
kitchen window (Ginny identified it as
an Anna’s hummingbird) depending
on the cant of its head, depending
on the way the flower’s cocked,
rapidly roving the range of reds—scarlet,
crimson, vermillion, maroon neckerchief
on the range or a top-shelf harlot’s
corset or burlesque dancers’
garter driven by hunger and
commerce, see red, red in tooth
and claw, cerise, cochineal,
damask, sanguine, carmine,
fulvous, rubicund, rubescent, titian,
red Japanese lady beetle red; those
beetles were brought from Japan to eat
aphids in pecan groves and they invade our house
in the fall collecting in the corners
of the ceiling. I envy them their footing,
mine slipping, grounded in the South
where kudzu was brought from Japan
to prevent erosion. My ranging
tendencies reach like kudzu tendrils.
That Anna’s hummingbird and Jan de Heems
painting remind me of extraordinary
rendition—to be taken away suddenly,
transported—an old tradition
fashionable again in recent times,
funny how things come back.
The receipt, this wisp,
this record from the machine will mark
an end and release me
to the day as the starlings carry on.
Published on June 10, 2020
First published in Harvard Review 44