Your father, ornithologist, binoculars in hand,
monitors their coming and going.
Mergansers, wood ducks, herons,
Canada geese rise up flapping
into the leaden November air.
Their lines roil, vee into vee.
Migration impels them south.
Gray sky outspread across the horizon,
meets straw-dry cattails stretched
as far as the eye can see.
Snug, wind-protected, golden as the flag
we labor, you and I, my belly rounding.
We sort out broad, juicy male flag
from hard-cored female brown-tufted cattails
anchored in fertile black muck.
“Ol-ka-leee,” a glossy ebony chorus,
our red-winged blackbird neighbors,
sings the warmth of community:
Roots, rhizomes and detritus
carpet our windbreak.
We’re content in this shelter.
As we toil, back bent,
a crescent blade, long-handled,
moves to our direction.
Thirty-inch lengths of cattail flag
pile into bundles,
wait to ride the singing rails
to caulk the stays on charred barrels,
to turn corn into caramel bourbon,
dancing gold in candlelit crystal.
…
You run sunny at my side,
to the swings, to your tricycle,
to your fire engine,
to climb trees.
Strawberry blonde, Eric the Red,
we named you.
Grown tall, now husband and father,
you fly across oceans sail-driven
and glide, wing-ed, hawk-like, on warm updrafts
above the verdant fields of Sacramento
and rocky cliffs
of our distant Pacific shores.
Son of our flesh,
Spirit of our spirit,
Wind of our lives.