1.
They work in garages,
in cold sheds behind houses,
in basements under harsh lights,
the men who make decoys.
At desks, or behind
the wheels of trucks,
all day their hands have ached
for this. They eat slowly,
savor their last cups,
and in a dream, breath
masked from the snuff of wood,
go now to set the false birds
free. Their saws are warm
and humming, their burrs,
their files, rotate
at an electric wish.
Everywhere is a fur
of dust; of walnut,
of white oak, logged forests
dried for this making.
With the flat of their palms
they measure the neck’s right curve
and set with an eye
an angle to the beak.
Such birds must look comfortable.
The glass eyes are inserted
in a parody of safety,
neither wild nor mad.
Now it is the caress
of repetitive fine abrasives
transforms to feathers
the annual rings, to a persuasion of down.
The paint is brilliant,
acrylic, quick-drying,
more accurate than nature.
It is touched with shadows.
There are seven shades of black.
2.
Such perfect creatures keep
at the edges of your mind.
They will not breed, are mere
flawless images. Let them bob
in the ebb of your knowledge.
Soon you will forget them.
White-fronts out of Spitzbergen,
flying through sleet cold enough
to freeze the soft tongues in their mouths,
would find your decoys faulty:
yet you can tease them down
with a sheet of newsprint
torn like a heart, and weighed
with a clod of grass. Set it
blunt end to the wind, and watch
the great birds from the sea
come flighting in. But the best,
the most killing of all deceits,
is a dead bird. Keep the few unbroken
of your last deaths. Place them
pale breasts to the sky, heads
to the wind; and let them lie
on the cold saltings,
on scatterings of snow no whiter
than the fans of their tails.
Do this alone, on a night
no other man would walk in,
wary of ice in your gun-barrels,
the tide shifting, the light
blown all ways of the compass.
You must be still as a dead bird.
3.
The gun has its knowledge, its action
fast as instinct. Once, on an empty night,
our sacks still folded, a heavy dew
an hour away with the dawn,
my gun swung in its own smooth curve,
pulling my hands to fire.
There was not a pause.
And the mallard fell out of darkness
in its weight, its feathered heaviness.
It was a green drake. I took it from the ditch
as its eye faded. By god, said my friend, dancing,
you scraped it off the face of the moon.
I brushed the wing that had pushed night from under it.
It was the gun had known.
4.
There are men, they are born with it,
who have the gift of calling.
They live in cottages on the saltings,
or if in villages, move quietly by night.
Nothing changes in their country but they know it;
the angle of a gate, a dropped branch, shifts in the wind.
For them the sky fills with wildfowl. The lanes of flight
clamor for them, for them sanderling
and redshank patter at the tide’s withdrawing runnels.
They turn, in quiet beds, at a flake of snow.
When they call, when they squat in a hide
or hide in a thick of bush,
they blow through cupped hands
for a meeting of animals and birds,
call again and again, the note rising,
an elegy for vulnerable creatures,
the hare, the partridge, runners and low fliers.
And for the waterbirds, for rafts of teal,
for pied shelduck, for skeins of geese,
brent goose, snow goose, pinkfoot, Canada,
the little bean goose, hardy in the air,
the royal swan, the whooper,
all humble on land, on their pliable webs.
Let the men put away rapacious lead, let them be still.
The birds have given them the wide cold sky,
they have given them dreams of innocence.
They have given them voices.