Great Blue Heron

Angels (they say) often can’t tell whether
they move among the living or the dead.
--Rilke


Shouting over traffic is no way to live,
But “Let’s pretend” could make an ocean of it:
You told me so.
The rushing of whitewater
On videotape easily loses sense:
Into these silences, static comes disguised.
Turning my back on the Broksonic, I might
Well be hearing the roar attending “CQ.”
Oh, but I was there, I stood on that foot-bridge:
That’s me you see there, shouting over water,
Getting ready to commend that much-beloved
Plastic can of chemicals to that speaking,
Snaking vivisector of downtown, for which
The Indians had a name which escapes me.
The discourse is relentless here, if indeed
That’s what it is; it’s been talking forever
To whoever would stop and hear, and some did,
Otherwise this spot would be anonymous.
Is it just a failing of mine that keeps it
Recondite, or is it some lunar snapshot,
An icy implication of no sub-text?

This presence then decides to assert itself:
Literally, it’s like that: a shadow-dash
From where no living thing had been seen to move
A moment ago: the water eloquent,
(Or just loud), an explosion in the pine-tops,
An annunciation and a reminder
Of the eyes that prevail downriver: strange eyes.
A fade-out for drawing in breath, (caesura)
And then it sentinels itself above the spot
Of our poorly-scripted little rite, and stays.
Fishers, these birds have been known to demonstrate
Every ounce of patience that fishing requires.


While I shoot videotape, our sister
Collects pine cones to make a memorial.
But he—or she—stays put, watching god-knows what,
And the river, quite loudly, proclaims nothing.
Goethe, in one of those pronouncements of his
That condemned him to appear on greeting cards,
Declared that he found the string quartet sublime:
Its give-and-take resembled conversation,
And he thought that the highest thing possible.
This semblance of a vigil in the treetops
Recalls a flash of insight in the small hours
I read of, many years ago: the torrent
Roaring in the dark on the hermit’s tin roof,
And the alert soul inside, insomniac,
Sadly noting the loss of all that language.

A human voice, on this CD, is the bird
Who warbles Siegfried on to his disaster.
The telephone wires of broad daylight imply
A network that may have torn us from the earth,
Or then again, just the opposite.
Another, musing on the infinite, heard
Something like that bird’s trilling in techno-hum:
Forest murmurs in the twiddling of dials.
Once, leaving Dulles, I clamped my Walkman on,
And as we bumped and slid above the ceiling,
Heard Valhalla falling down around my ears,
Literally. Similar scrim curtains light
And fade to black with each blinking of the eye.
And so, as I put the rented Ford Taurus
Into drive, my fingers in contact with sweet-
smelling vinyl, that shadow is unmoving,
Blaring, silent, shadowing our drive away,
No coded speech, or all of them together.
And you, now the river, go where rivers go,
As we face the whirlpool of afternoon’s night.

Having abandoned time and linear speech,
Is this now a speech that takes the place of words:
The reappearing herald of your choosing?
We cross the bridge downtown in the afternoon.
There, on the rocks in the low autumn river,
Above the falls that drip in this pale season,
It appears yet again, unnoticed before,
But now intrusive, bold, like a panhandler
Who follows you along the sidewalk, and won’t
Get out of your face until you give him change,
Or get nasty. Am I reading your words right?
Are these gestures words? Are they even gestures?
To ask too much certainty would be petty,
Perhaps even self-defeating. Who would know,
After all, outside of some raving zealot
Embarrassing everyone within earshot,
How to handle a dose of revelation?

We were the ones who grew up in movie theaters:
I saw 2001 when I was 13,
And was more awestruck than any time in church,
Particularly during that final scene:
The old man acknowledges the mute-but-stern
Presence, then, as Also Sprach Zarathustra
Swells again, undergoes transfiguration.
So, window-shopping downtown before dinner,
A start, a moment: there is that shape again,
There, in a shop window, unmistakable,
Only this time with that touch of artifice
An old master gave imaginary birds:
That frozen whisper we almost dare not hear,
Yet again, (and on cue, like in the movies.)
It’s too much. Evening is here. In my pocket
Are tickets to the theater for 8:30.
Across the street, our sister shops for sweaters.
I wave to get her attention, tap my wrist,
And turn my back on that artificial bird.
Rimming the dark river, city lights commence,
And I’m shouting over traffic to be heard.


Kelley Dupuis

Note: Great Blue Heron was written in the winter and early spring of 2005. It was occasioned by an experience my older sister and I had when we took the ashes of our younger sister, Lynne, to Spokane, Washington in the fall of 2004 to scatter them in the Spokane River. Our family had lived in Spokane briefly when we were children, and Lynne was very happy there, so it seemed like the appropriate thing to do after her death from an overdose of drugs on Sept. 10, 2004. As things turned out, nature seemed to agree. -- KD