A slipping whistling sliding sound of a song
calls my attention at the City of Helena
Solid Waste Transfer Station where the sign reads
NO SCAVENGING Violators Will Be Prosecuted
where I was just moments ago with my seven-year-old
son and our recycling minding my own business
and with questions on my mind—Where will this
harvest from our garbage go? What will we reap?
What did we sow?—when your song found me and I
call my son’s attention to it. I want to share the singer
with my son in the middle of our recycling run to this
transfer station like when a jam from my youth
comes on the radio when we’re in the middle of our
erranding for things to bring home and I get excited.
I once heard the clear whistles of one of your eastern
cousins’ songs and thought it sang Hey young man, go away.
And once a friend said you sound like you’re singing a question;
he heard a rising call that I didn’t, and if it was, it would
have been uptalking seeking agreement, right? Since, what
question would you have? Aside from those questions of life—
how to keep your body safe and going in order to make
generations to come—those needs and drives, which may sit
in you not as questions. At any rate, I want him, my son,
to see you, the belter of the song that drops, a drawly
glissando or perhaps twangy vibrato, a western song,
with that bright bib, the yellow of a sunflower? Some flower?
Or maybe the yellow of detritus gathered with hope
of it getting a new use—an emptied laundry detergent
jug or Pacifico can? Not a question in my want,
what I mean is (trying to find you with my eye) I want
to show my boy not metaphors in the day but your coal black
necklace bold against that yellow reminding me of that boy-mensch
Charlie Brown’s shirt and your streaked mantle of browns
and blacks on your wings and back matching the dried grasses
and the shadows they cast to keep you hid in your ground feeding
and ground nesting habits and hard to find in this valley east
of MacDonald Pass and the continental divide in this watershed
with your spill of those liquid slipping notes in a run that floats
open over the open land next to the roll-off dumpsters.
ABOUT THE POET
Sean Hill is the author of Dangerous Goods and Blood Ties & Brown Liquor,
and the forthcoming collection, The Negroes Send Their Love. His poems have
appeared in Callaloo, Harvard Review, The Oxford American, Poetry, Tin House,
and numerous other journals, and in several anthologies including Black Nature
and Villanelles. Hill lives in southwestern Montana with his family and is an
associate professor of creative writing at the University of Montana.
ABOUT SUGAR HOUSE REVIEW
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from any of our issues, we were delighted to print your work, now we’re eager to
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