Loren Eiseley: "Fly Falcon"

Fly Falcon

All of the falcon kind, the hard travelling
                                 talon-clawed ones
that for so many years I have seen
go over Hawk Mountain on thousand-mile journeys--
at heart I go with them, but I also travel
with the fluttering Monarch butterflies,   
toss on gales lost at sea, or cross the Gulf
                                      with humming birds.
You think this impossible? not with the mind's eye
                                                        my friend
                                           the ever widening eye
of the living world, the eye that someday
will see all as one, the eye of the hurricane,
                                                         the eye
at the heart of the galaxy with the spinning
                                        arms of the suns about it.
Fly falcon, fly Monarch, fly gull
                               and you in the invisible night-tiger's eye
going somewhere in reed grass.  I am there
padding softly with you, fly albatross
that sleeps on the Cape Horn  winds.  We are all
the terrible eye that sees the galaxy,
                                  we make it real.
Without us multiplied, what really exists?
Fly falcon, stare tiger in the night grass,
stare that the universe may find itself living
beyond the immortal fires.

-- Loren Eiseley --
from Another Kind of Autumn




I think this is the core or heart of the poem--the eye of the imagination or the mind's eye.

You think this impossible? not with the mind's eye
                                                        my friend
                                           the ever widening eye
of the living world, the eye that someday
will see all as one, the eye of the hurricane,
                                                         the eye
at the heart of the galaxy with the spinning
                                        arms of the suns about it.


But it suggests also something more--"   the ever widening eye/of the living world, the eye that someday/will see all as one." I think this goes beyond a reference to the imagination.  In the Upanishads, correct me if I'm wrong, Brahman is the unchanging reality both in the midst of and beyond reality.  Brahman is all, it looks out of the tiger's eye and out of the eye of that tiger's prey.




And how can one understand the very last part of the poem?


We are all
the terrible eye that sees the galaxy,
                                  we make it real.
 Without us multiplied, what really exists?
Fly falcon, stare tiger in the night grass,
stare that the universe may find itself living
beyond the immortal fires.



The "us"?  All living beings perhaps?   Again, there is that eye that sees the galaxy--that makes it real.  And somehow this eye must
 
stare that the universe may find itself living
beyond the immortal fires.

Living beyond the immortal fires?

It's a poem to puzzle over.  Eiseley hints in his prose works a belief in something more than the material world, but he only hints at it, points at things that seem strange once one looks closely at them.  I don't read Eiseley for answers, but for questions and perhaps a rattling of my cage when I begin to think I really know what's going on.

I suspect that after reading this poem,  I will see Dusky, my cat whom I have shared my quarters with for almost seventeen years now, and wonder how much I really know about her.   What does she see that I don't?

Loren Eiseley: In the Tales to Come

In The Tales To Come

"I have met the echo people, coyotes,
once in my youth, deep in a badland canyon, coming
upon them unaware.  They vanished
before I could speak.  Esahcawata, Old-man-coyote's people
quick of foot, hunted by all, surviving
traps and poison bait, surviving
where the great wolves have vanished, admirable
tricksters in an endless war.  I would have spoken
peace, but my kind know it not.  They did well
not to trust me--the trap-shy scurriers at midnight.
Their songs are few now.  They live by the thoughts
of Esahcawata and no other thinking is
                                             possible for them.
Their songs echo the wind.  They are echo people
                                                                      but all
under the sky  are echoers and the millennia listen
                                                        and are silent.
It will be so with us.  I have remembered
all my life how fast they scampered.  We the laughers
do not understand fear because of our numbers
                                                and when we vanish
no one will tell stories about our cleverness, the night wind
will not long echo laughter for Old-man, the trickster
married the whirlwind and myth will have us
as part of the singular spinning of a dust-devil
on a dry prairie.  They are the echoers, we
a jumble  of leaves and dust
quickly gone by.  Lovers of form we will be formless
in the tales to come."

-- Loren Eiseley --
from Another Kind of Autumn


 Eiseley's poem, I think, can be seen as prophetic--a prophecy of the differing fates of the coyote and humanity.  The coyote will be remembered because it is part of the natural world.  In spite of all we can do, the coyote is flourishing, in spite of  "traps and poison bait" or hunters with guns, be they on foot or on horseback or in a helicopter.  According to the Nationale Geographic article,  "These members of the dog family once lived primarily in open prairies and deserts, but now roam the continent's forests and mountains. They have even colonized cities like Los Angeles, and are now found over most of North America. Coyote populations are likely at an all-time high."

Humanity can claim credit for this for it is likely that wiping out large predators, such as the wolf and large cats, allowed the coyote to move into the vacancy thus created.

The poet surmises that in the future the coyote's call will be echoed long after the coyote has disappeared (I suspect that the coyote will outlive humanity if it can avoid being completely exterminated by civilized humans).  On the other hand, humanity is busily working on cutting its link with the natural world (destroying the natural world might be more accurate) and eventually will live in a digital, virtual world, electronic bits of 0s and 1s.   Humanity is like a dust devil which appears suddenly, rushes about with great energy, causing disruption where it goes, and then just as suddenly disappears, leaving no sign of its passing.

"They are the echoers, we
a jumble  of leaves and dust
quickly gone by.  Lovers of form we will be formless
in the tales to come."

Loren Eiseley: "Wind Child"

WIND CHILD


They have just found where Monarch butterflies go
                                                                  in autumn
those red-gold drifters edged in black
that blow like leaves but never         
                              quite coming to rest,
always fluttering  
                              a little out of reach,
                                         disapearing
over the next house, or just making it
                                     above the hedge
flickering evasively through the last sunlight,
                                       the attrition tremendous,
                                       thousands die,
blown to sea, lost to children, lost to enemies but
                                            beating, beating on,
speed fourteen miles an hour on a three-thousand mile
                                                                             course to Mexico.
                
                          Where is the compass?
                              We don't know.
                          How did the habit start?
                               We don't know.
                         Why do the insects gather
                                 in great clumps on trees
                                 in the Sierra Madre?
                              We don't know.
They are individualists.  They fly alone.  Who wouldn't
                                                                     in autumn
like to rock and waver southward like an everblowing leaf
             over and through forests and hedges,
                       float in the glades             
                          sip the last nectar?
What a way to go, you make it, or you don't, or the winds
                         snatch you away.
Fly Monarchs and then, if your wings are not too old and frayed,
start the long road back in the spring.  Nature is
                                                 prodigal in numbers
prodigal of her milkweed children (did they learn to travel
                                                        from milkweed down?)
But I was overlooked, am really not human,
              would be first a tiger-striped caterpillar
              and then a Monarch, elusive, flickering, solitary
blowing on storms and beating, always beating
                        to go somewhere else, to another flower.
               Over the fence then.  Out of humanity.
                           I am a wind child.   

-- Loren Eiseley --
from Another Kind of Autumn


This, to me, is the most evocative part of the poem.  I can close my eyes and see them, remember them doing exactly this.  I don't know if they were Monarchs, but I do remember butterflies fluttering over rooftops and then barely clearing a low hedge, pausing briefly at a blossom or a brightly colored shirt on a clothesline, and then moving on, always moving on.   It is hard to believe that they are hardy enough to make a journey of thousands of miles and then some able to come back several seasons later. .

those red-gold drifters edged in black
that blow like leaves but never         
                              quite coming to rest,
always fluttering  
                              a little out of reach,
                                         disapearing
over the next house, or just making it
                                     above the hedge
flickering evasively through the last sunlight,



Shakespeare has Hamlet at one point say "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."--even such an ordinary, commonplace creature as a butterfly is a marvel, once we look closely at it.

Loren Eiseley: We Are The Scriveners

We Are The Scriveners

I have not seen her in forty years.
She is old now, or lies in one of those midwestern
farm cemeteries where
no one remembers for long, because everyone
leaves for the cities. She was young, with freckles
and a wide generous mouth, a good girl to have
loved for a lifetime but the world
always chooses otherwise, or we ourselves
in blindness. I would not remember so clearly save that here
by a prairie slough sprinkled with the leaves of autumn
the drying mud on the shore shows the imprint
of southbound birds. I am too old to travel,
but I suddenly realize how a man in Sumer
half the world and millennia away
saw the same imprint and thought
there is a way of saying upon clay, fire-hardened,
there is a way of saying
"loneliness"
a way of saying
"where are you?" across the centuries
a way of saying
"forgive me"
a way of saying
"We were young. I remember, and this, this clay
imprinted with the feet of birds
will reach you somewhere
somehow
if it take eternity to answer."
There were men
like this in Sumer, or who wept among the
autumn papyrus leaves in Egypt.
We are the scriveners who with pain
outlasted our bodies.

-- Loren Eiseley --
from Another Kind of Autumn

Writing is a way of talking with someone, not only separated by distance, but also by time. Sometimes there's no way of answering; the best one can do is listen and pass on the message to someone who has yet to come. The spirit of the poem reminds me of one of my favorite poems by Walt Whitman--"A noiseless patient spider," the last stanza of which follows. You can read the complete poem if you scroll down to the bottom.


And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to
connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.


I think Eiseley and Whitman would understand each other.

Loren Eiseley: "The Shore Haunters"

The Shore Haunters

Here in this dry, rocky, fired-out place
one can still see the subsiding shorelines of a giant lake;
one can still see
where the blue mountain glaciers fed it,
where mammoth grazed,
and now all
is stone and gravel, a Martian landscape
with a few bits of flaked obsidian
high on the bitter shores.

The world changes, that is the lesson, but no one
lives long enough to remember, either man
or beast, and the archeologist
is an anomaly here. The bones of the elephant,
the sandals in the cave by the high lake shore.
speak to no one in particular.

Later, by this great dam
in the Poconos
I see the motorboats and think
we will always be here, that the pinewoods should shrink
is unthinkable, but so was this unthinkable
to the shore haunters--beasts or men--nevertheless
it happened, the vanishing ice and the fire
like the heart's final
contracting country, blackened cinders, dry beaches,
the unimaginable place.

Loren Eiseley
from Another Kind of Autumn

Loren Eiseley: "Another Kind of Autumn," a poem

I was surprised when I discovered that Loren Eiseley was a poet, as well as an essayist. However, the style of his prose writings should have told me. Here is one, an autumn poem.


Another Kind of Autumn

The petrified branch with the harsh look whose mineralized
splinters are needle sharp
was living a hundred million years ago,
bent to invisible wind, put out leaves on the mountain.
Today
the mountain is gone and this fragment
lies on my desk imperishable and waits for me in turn
to be gone.
Living once it has taken to minerals for survival.
This hand that writes
stiffens, but has no such powers, no crystalline absorption
to hold a pen through eons while slow thought gutters
from lichen-green boulders and fallen pinnacles.
Ink will congeal and perish, the pen rust into its elements,
the thought here, the realization of time, perish
with the dissolving brain. It appears the universe
likes the seams of the coal, the lost leaf imprinted in shale,
the insect in amber, but thought it gives to the wind
like the season's leaf fall. Where is the wind that shaped
this branch?
It perhaps still moves in the air, but the branch has fallen.
Its unfamiliar leaves are now part of my body
and I let the pen drop with my hand, thinking
this is another kind of autumn to be expected.
Leaves and thought are scarcely returnable. The wind
loses them
or one remains in the shale like an unread hieroglyph
once meaningful in clay.
-- Loren Eiseley --
the title poem from Another Kind of Autumn


We too often think that our intellectual powers and consciousness make us creation's finest achievement, but, even if true, it's a short-lived reign at best. I doubt that even our most magnificent architectural structures or our most imposing intellectual compositions will last as long as that petrified branch.