Carry.

COUNTING BIRDS

As a child, fresh out of the hospital

with tape covering the left side

of my face, I began to count birds.

At age fifty the sum total is precise and astonishing, my only secret.

Some men count women or cars

they've owned, their shirts --

long sleeved and short sleeved --

or shoes, but I have my birds,

excluding, of course, the extraordinary

days: the twenty-one thousand

snow geese and sandhill cranes at

Bosque del Apache, the sky blinded

by great frigate birds in the Pacific

off Anconcito, Ecuador; the twenty-one

thousand pink flamingos an Ngorongoro Crater

in Tanzania; the vast flocks of sea birds

on the Seri coast of the Sea of Cortez

down in Sonora that left at nightfall,

then reappearing, resuming

their exact positions at dawn;

the one thousand cliff swallows nesting in he sand cliffs of Pyramid Point,

their small round burrows like eyes,

really the souls of the Anasazi who flew

here a thousand years ago

to wait the coming of the Manitou.

And then there were the usual, almost deadly

birds of the soul -- the crow with silver

harness I rode one night as if she

were a black, feathered angel.

the birds I became to escape unfortunate

circumstances -- how the skin ached

as the feathers shot out toward the light;

the thousand birds the dogs helped

me shoot to become a bird (grouse, woodcock,

duck, dove, snipe, pheasant, prairie chicken, etc.).

On my deathbed I'll write this secret

number on a slip of paper and pass

it to my wife and two daughters.

It will be a hot evening in June

and they might be glancing out the window

at the thunderstorm's approach from the west.

Looking past their eyes and a dead fly

on the window screen I'll wonder

if there's a bird waiting for me in the onrushing clouds.

O birds, I'll sing to myself, you've carried

me along on this bloody voyage,

carry me now into that cloud

into the marvel of this final night.

Jim Harrison