Sean Hill on Nature, Place, and Black Life

BirdNote^®

Sean Hill on Nature, Place, and Black Life

Written by Mark Bramhill

Mark Bramhill: This is BirdNote.

Poet Sean Hill has moved around many times in his life — between Georgia, California, Texas, Alaska, Minnesota, and now to Montana. While getting to know his new home in the Treasure State, Sean went up to Mount Helena for a hike…

Sean Hill: …when I saw the Western Tanager. It flew by. It was this beautiful flash. I was like, okay, that's a good omen, good auspice. I think I'm gonna be okay in this place.

Mark Bramhill: Around the same time, Sean went to a reading for a book about Rose Gordon, a Black woman born in Montana in the late 19th Century.

Sean Hill: There's a lot of Black folk who moved here, more than you might think, in the 19th Century. And raised families and stayed for generations. And this person in the audience was like, “why Montana? Why did these people come here?” So part of it's like, ‘why do people move places?’

[Lonesome, peaceful zither music]

The Western Tanager or Why Montana
Piranga ludoviciana

Are wanderings the same as migrations?
I came to Montana for love, which sometimes is
how we know our destinations.

The Western Tanager flies here for procreation 
when the snow goes wet, puddles, runs, and takes to 
far wandering. Is this the same as migration?

A life is the sum of grand and modest peregrinations. 
Communities bloom at the meeting of opportunity 
and ambition and can be a way to know our destinations.

A fire-engine red head cooling to orange to 
a sunny yellow body with those charcoal wings, 
the male western tanager flashes conflagration

or an eastern autumn, in flight. One, familiar, greeted 
me shortly after we both arrived letting me know 
our wanderings weren’t the same—his, a migration.

In a stand of ponderosas where a blanket of snow lay for decades 
or longer, the dendrologist says these trees moved up from what’s 
Mexico as that quiet water pulled back, a different migration

—moving seed by seed north generationally migrating 
to where they had been and where they could live 
never asking how do we know our destination?

Why Montana? One among my interrogations, 
both public and private like How big is a home? 
Are wanderings the same as migrations?
and How do I know my destinations?

Mark Bramhill: If you noticed a lot of repetition in this poem, that's because it's what's known as a villanelle. It's a poetic form, like a sonnet or a limerick — but rather than simply having a rhyme scheme, a villanelle also has two lines alternately repeated throughout the poem. In Why Montana, you have…

Sean Hill: Are our wanderings the same as migrations?

Mark Bramhill: …and…

Sean Hill: How we know our destinations.

Mark Bramhill: Some poets find this form especially tricky, but it's a form Sean frequently reaches for.

Sean Hill: The sort of recursiveness of the villanelle works for the way I sort of think and ruminate about things. Keep coming back to things. And I like the challenge of trying to work the refrains, in a different context to, sort of, whenever they return to make a turn happen.

Mark Bramhill: So, each time you hear an iteration of these repeated lines, the context and meaning is a little different, moving the poem forward. I highly recommend listening to the poem again and paying attention to the differences each repetition brings.

Alright, this next poem is about the unexpected sounds in quiet moments, from when Sean was living in Texas.

    [Wistful alternative guitar music begins]

In Houston

Eating a ripe football-sized papaya (product of Mexico) 
for breakfast while sitting on the back deck, I see three 
ibises fly in a line over my house, low enough for me 
to hear their wingbeats, sounding nowhere near as 
desperate as sand sifting through the narrow neck 
of an hourglass, but more like your hair sweeping 
the pillow next to me in bed when I’m close enough 
to see the palisade of pigment edging your lips
that borderline where dusk meets the pales keeping 
out everything I can’t imagine beyond them when 
I’m safe in the village. These white birds with black 
wing tips that perhaps in some myth they dipped 
in the inkiness of all terrestrial matters 
before painting the night sky with their upstrokes.
I’m as amazed to hear these ibises (trailing legs 
and leading with crescent beaks the same color 
as this papaya) as I was to hear your hair 
when I expected your heartbeat.

    [Music begins to fade]

Mark Bramhill: Our last poem today is from Sean’s first book, Blood Ties & Brown Liquor. The book spans six familial generations of the fictional character Silas Wright, a Black man born in Milledgeville, Georgia in 1907. In this poem, Silas has a quiet, ordinary moment — seeing a Great Blue Heron while fishing — but it has a transformative effect. 

[Slow, slightly brooding banjo music begins]

Silas Fishing 1967

That heron yonder’s 
a good fisherman—
patient—will wade 
and wait. But it ain’t 
a good day for fishing—
neither of us having 
no luck—just minnows 
nibbling my bait.
There he goes—up and off 
to another pond I suppose—
trailing those long legs, flapping 
slow and steady. I cried and cried 
the day Mama died. And it hurt 
me deep when my wife…when 
Devorah passed. But I didn’t 
shed a tear. Been near ten years 
and here they come 
like the drops from 
that heron’s feet.

Sean Hill: I was thinking about the etymology of grief and how grief is related to gravity. And there's this way in which the weight of the water dripping, those drops somehow allow for Silas’s grief to happen.

Mark Bramhill: You can find links to more of Sean Hill’s poetry — and more episodes with poetry about birds! — on our website, BirdNote.org. I'm Mark Bramhill.

    [Music ends]

###
Senior Producer: John Kessler
Producer: Mark Bramhill
Managing Editor: Jazzi Johnson
Managing Producer: Conor Gearin
Content Director: Jonese Franklin
Bird sounds provided by The Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York. ML65634171 - Western Tanager recording by Jay McGowan. ML92488041 - Great Blue Heron recording by Paul Marvin. ML169297051 - Great Blue Heron recording by Bill Schmoker.
Music: Timid Strings by Blue Dot Sessions; Tremolomoln by Lymland; By the Bayou, at Dusk by Mark Bramhill and Sam Johnson.
BirdNote’s theme was composed and played by Nancy Rumbel and John Kessler.
© 2023 BirdNote April 2023
Narrator: Mark Bramhill

ID# hills-01-2023-04-26            hills-01