I've had the Billy Collins poem "Birds of America" open on my desktop for a while. (During NPM I'm spring-cleaning tabs that have collected on my desktop. Once I post them I can close them.) It addresses a birder's dilemma. Audubon, from whom we learned so much about birds in an era before binoculars and before the kind of cameras that could get decent bird pictures, made his pictures not from life but from death. He just shot his models and then arranged them realistically to do his painting. And sure, that was really the only way back then to get all the details he needed, but he seemed to enjoy it entirely too much. (Check out my post here about the way he wrote about the American Woodcock, how fun it was to mow them down and other equally delightful musings.)
The Birds of America
by Billy Collins
Early this morning
in a rumpled bed,
listening to birdsong
through the propped-open windows,
I saw on the ceiling
the figure of John J. Audubon
kneeling before
the pliant body of an expired duck.
You can read the rest here. (You'll have to click over to the next page for the last stanza.)
Leigh Anne has today's line for the Progressive Poem.
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