"Oh Louis! won't you try once making a background wholly out of the
bird's colors: Just his actual color-notes as you paint them."
--Gerald Thayer, letter to Louis Agassiz Fuertes, 1908--

Paint this. The plover, its markings, lost
in a spray of twigs and summer leaves.
The white-throated quail dove poised on a fallen
log, the low-grasses, ferns, a disguise
my water colors dare hardly match.
A Wilson's Tern on its nest, the marshy
ground a shadow for the mottled-brown,
dusky and gray costume. Or Scotch Grouse,
hidden among the sage and heathers.
When what's demanded, what must be portrayed
is the bird itself. Its colorations.
Out hunting, I bring down a sora, barely visible
in the olive-colored sedge. Paint this.
The bird as in life. Not its skin
stretched and loosely stuffed, as artifice
might pose it on a branch, but in mid-
flight, beak open, wings ajar.
I stroke its feathers, purring, crooning.
Its eyes fast losing what colors might
beat warm as blood, the flush, translucent,

ebbing now. I must memorize it,
quickly. The blur of ink, pigments,
the wingspan, its body emerging
from my brush tip, more motion than substance.
And birds my passion. The frog's view
of a heron, the crouching hare's of a eagle
is not mine. To paint it though is
a canvas trick. The background obscure
enough to hide from enemy or prey.
Woodcocks mistaken for the vines
where I spy them. Short-eared owls
nesting on sun-dried grasses, their shading
a perfect match. Their survival depends
on mimicking the changes each season.
I'm a collector of these landscapes, birds.
Working and re-working the jay,
the sparrowhawk, the blue merging with reds,
no distinct line anywhere. Paint this.
A curved surface, shadow of a flower,
the softness in the phoebe's tufted crest.

*first appeared in Poetry Northwest 1997