Photo by Sam McMillan

Feathers in the Soul

John Solensten

                      My Iranian neighbors sometimes speak of the Sohbet, the mystical conversation that
          occurs, quite suddenly sometimes, when an “openhearted” person becomes involved in
          exploring the mystery of “a spiritual presence in the physical and natural world.”
        In his search for an elusive something in the natural world in rural Minnesota, in that early November in 1941, my father hunted—hunted in his own way—his own eccentric way—yes, hunted and swept me, his son, with him into whiteness and wings.
        He announced his intention to hunt that Sunday morning the same way he announced that it was time to go to church. He simply said, “It is time. Dress to hunt. Today we seek the last of the snow geese.”
        He dressed for the occasion as he dressed for church: wool jacket from one worn suit, trousers from another. A frayed tie flapped like a dark tongue at the white shirt, boots and a heavy coat, an ancient Norwegian army thing with hood.
        It embarrassed me when he wore those clothes in town: they spoke of our family poverty.
        I knew how the hunt would go. Always he hunted late migrating snow geese, hunted (I with him) standing among bare cottonwood and elm trees on a tall crest on the river waiting for birds to pass overhead, his 1907 hammer shotgun leaned against a tree trunk.
        Pass shooting, he called it.
        That hunt—that Sabbath hunt—began as heavy snow descended on the land, defining in wind and drift the end of autumn days, the beginning of winter in the fields and in the wide river lands.
        Yes, and in my persisting memory of it we are hunting.
        We stand together as we stand together in the oak pews in church waiting for gospel or epistle. No attempt at concealment, no blind, no camouflage.
        He is silent.
        He turns to me and yells into the wind, “In the owl-light in the fallen snow you can see after darkfall. The snow does not silence or blind!”
        I nod at him and he is silent again.
        He has been silent most of the time recently. He sat bent over into his space in the passenger side of the car as we drove toward the river. “I have a cancer,” he had advised me a week or so earlier. “I am becoming acquainted with pain,” he had said to me.
        He has not spoken of treatment or cure.
        The farmer-landowner—seeing my father’s strange hunting apparel as we were asking his permission to hunt—laughed and called out to him:”Goin’ to church, Martin?”
        He did not reply.
        The geese are resting out on the wide reaches of the dark river water.
        He stands in front of me, his face toward them, watching them as I step sideways and watch them myself:
 
        Snow Geese Rafting On the River

        I cannot quite see their eyes
        but only mask thin
        apostrophes of eyes
        that tell me
        they are out of hunter range.
        Now in my chill,
        in my snow beat restlessness
        I watch the great raft of them
        ride on water
        bulged in swollen tides
        by the brute north wind
        and see
        they do not move.
        And I know
        they keep their great white host
        steady, steady–far out–safe–
        holding together
        with the steady paddling
        of their webbed black web feet–
        until–at some voice I cannot hear–
        they rise
        with tumultuous choric yelping
        into the tall gray towers
        of migratory wind
        and are gone.

        Yes, they rise from the water—yelping and wheeling in great circles—and slide off with the wind. In that moment the water, the sky, seem empty in a final way. The tall grass on the shore bends down, submitting to the wind. The blank water speaks of brute ice. No use to look up into the sky. The flight is done, wings gone. The land and water and sky say, “Time for silence in the snowy fields and stone hard earth and winter sleep and winter dreams.”
        My father nods at me, turns to look northwest over the long reach of the river and yells, “Time to go!”
        I object—as usual—and ask,” Isn’t there something yet?”
        “Not here!” he replies, his face grim, grim as we walk toward the car.
        We have forgotten the guns. I hurry to retrieve them.
        So we begin the drive home, slamming into drifts already forming on the roads, bucking them, bucking them. I am worried. I remember those hunters who died in the Great Blizzard in November of 1940. I remember the terror, the chill seeing their grotesque, interlocked figures lying in the straw in the horse sleds and farm wagons that carried them past me through the town.
        I looked for their eyes and could not find them.
        As we drive toward the town I am also worried because I can feel the surges of his pain in his sudden bending forward in his passenger car seat.
        He pulls himself up and is looking upward through the car windshield.
        I am struggling to see the road through the white fury of snow.
        Suddenly he cries, “Stop, please!”opens his door, steps out.
        And then he is stumbling down the ditch toward the whirling white world out in the oat stubble.
        The engine of the car is running, the lights and hand brake on. When I step out of the car, the wind whips my face, stinging it, telling me to go back.
        I walk up behind him there where he stands near the fence beyond the ditch.
        He is looking upward into the sky where there are quick blue openings in the heavy clouds. Ah, yes. There above us long strings of snow geese are climbing the tall wind towers. I can barely hear their voices in the wind. They are perhaps five hundred feet up. They are vague phantoms, their wings beating, beating steadily to hold course.
        What does he want from them?
        Suddenly a ray of sun light flares on their wings.
        Holds for just a moment.
        He stands looking into the madness of the whirling snow as the geese slide downwind and out of sight.
        “We have to get back!” I cry at him.
        Him, a dark figure in a coat, his shoulders lifted, his face held upward into the beat of the snow.
        Him, this father-stranger.
        The turning blue window in the gray sky closes.
        He turns, climbs the ditch toward the car.
        He sits in the car, a tear of snow at his glasses, his nose beaked red with the cold. He is wearing a brief fool’s smile on his face.
        “Behold a host arrayed in white!” he cries.
        “What?”
        “Arrayed in white!”
        Damn! I want to reply, but….
        We drive slowly, silently townward.
        He sits stiffly upright, looking straight ahead of the car as it beats through flaring drifts toward the town.
        At home my mother makes me hot chocolate; she does not ask him if he wants some, whispers his name just once as he stands before her: “Martin!”
        He turns to his chair and books, keeps his silence, his pain.
        But I know we are not done with the day: life with birds does not pose and hold on a human schedule.
        The snow seems to be lifting off the streets in the town.
 
        NOCTURNE
        As darkness falls, crows—sweeping up and over the town from sheds of trees on the river—tear the town sky briefly with hooked black wings and harsh voices.
        I feel something there in the counterpoint of their blackness, something else that resists my human presence, my human knowing.
        Something that moves wings, feathers in the soul.