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Frost Notes |
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Anthology |
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Linda Dove Linda Dove's "Notes from the Field" received an honorable mention in the 2004 Robert Frost Award. In this field guide to her imagination, the poet deftly credits her sources, "I know that/from Robert Frost but also from my mother."
Notes From the Field I know things about birds— I know that tiny hooks connect their feathers, the gonydeal angle runs along a seagull’s lower bill, bones have struts but otherwise are hollow. I know that a flycatcher sits high in the tree, follows the line of a bug through air, finds his former perch. I know that hawks flap and vultures circle and hummingbirds fly backwards. I know that ovenbirds sit mid-tree and sing, teacher-teacher-teacher. I know that from Robert Frost and also from my mother. My mother counted birds. She worked the bird-thirty hour, that moment where birdsong is the world’s alarm. I saw her charts, her columns, her dots to mark how many. I held the heavy glasses, cranked the lenses back-and-forth to make the view distorted. I knew her book with the pictures that taught me colors like lazuli, cerulean and rufous. I learned about bird-habits, the hardest thing of all to know not counting voices. My mother knew the birds by song. House sparrow. Purple finch. Swainson’s thrush. Grosbeak. Oriole. By the water, a green heron. In the high grass, a meadowlark. Bobolinks. She didn’t need to see to know. In our house, rewards were early mornings, counting birds. It was a time of adults and animals. The day I saw a giant wingspan disappear into the forest’s edge, I knew we couldn’t count this pulse of air behind a wing. If it was an owl, I didn’t know. Through my mother, I sense what comes from this knowing— a language of numbers and one of words. And so there’s the day in college I walked my mother by the lake, up through the maples, into a sloping marsh, peat on our shoes. We heard them first, before the rush of black and yellow lifted past us. Bobolinks, my mother said. I thought they could have been a parade of tin whistles. Perhaps glass bangles slipped on a wrist by a lover. Or laughter around a My mother rotated towards them, turned their song into number.
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Linda Dove
writes and ranches in Skull Valley, Arizona, following fifteen years of
college teaching. She holds
a Ph.D. in Renaissance literature from the University of Maryland,
College Park, and taught at UMD, at Hope College in Holland, Michigan,
and at Yavapai College in Prescott, Arizona, where she briefly directed
the creative writing program. Her
poems have appeared or are forthcoming in North American Review, Georgetown
Review, Alligator Juniper, Words & Images, Frost
Notes, and Portland Pen, and have won numerous awards,
including the 2005 Stephen Dunn Award in Poetry and the 2001 Alice
Longan Award for a collection inspired by the Southwest.
She was a semi-finalist in the 2004 “Discovery” / The
Nation Poetry Award.
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Poem copyright 2005 by Linda Dove |
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