Stephen Collis
A Single Starling is No Such Thing
Said this out loud
for no one and nothing
not starry regions
not avian minds hovering
you and I are nothing
swarms of particles
constellations
governed by laws
fuzzy states between
here and there
Said this to no one
said this to a bird
swooping pulse
throb and oscillation
I’ll have a starling
be taught to speak
but what if all it says
is untranslatable
gurgling and sputtering chatter?
A single starling is no such thing
as one grain of sand or one drop of rain
what is vision—what is harmony?
A swarm is what we want to be
flocking telepathic collective thought
flash out so many minds moving
though the starling has
much higher temporal resolution
has affinity groups in sevens
just these nearest seven in flight
sevens touching other sevens
you do the math
fractal and telepathic
navigating by quick norms
I am looking for love in numbers
if I form a flock I am leaving
get my breathe by being in sync
tunes me and sets my rhythm straight
an attraction zone / a repulsion zone
and angular alignment
votes being counted
despite the turn in the weather
What is at the limit of the infinite?
What is moving out this mobile mesh
of black purple indigo and deep green
background radiation scintilla of feathers
from out which cosmic depths
stars shoot as million pinholes streaming
to make one bird plumed for night
rise into collective form
of flocks governed by their flock members
of the measure of sevens
of the nearness of wing-to-wing communication
of parables stars and spies of the midnight heavens
Said this was an accident
said it seemed a single bird
abandoned on a hedge
was nothing but an accident
couldn’t identify one without many
There is only one quarrel in the world
Hölderlin wrote:
which is more important,
the whole or the individual part?
And there was no one human way
to choose or maneuver
and sometimes accidentally en masse
thousands of starlings just will form
the fleeting and fluid image
of one leviathanic starling-of-starlings
is all we ever needed to know of politics
and the impossible
and what was common or
could be commoned
crowd wheeling through dim streets
shouts smoke and breaking glass
the air and its breathing
the covert the cell
sevens touching other sevens
the street of streetlights lighting
swells through cosmic voids
brilliant dark out of darkness splintering
earths dead or alive or still just spinning
all that is a bundle of feathers in flight
all that is bundled
into the bundle of bundles
Dear friend Hölderlin continues
I need pure tones …
the philosophic light around my window …
I think we shall not gloss the poets up to our time
their lettered murmuration
I think mere radiance is what we honed
wing to wing biome to biome
Stephen Collis is the author of a dozen books of poetry and prose, including The Commons (2008), the BC Book Prize winning On the Material (2010), Once in Blockadia (2016), Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten (2018), and A History of the Theories of Rain (2021)—all published by Talonbooks. In 2015 he was awarded the Nora and Ted Sterling Prize in Support of Controversy, and in 2019 he was the recipient of the Latner Writers’ Trust of Canada Poetry Prize. He lives near Vancouver, on unceded Coast Salish Territory, and teaches poetry and poetics at Simon Fraser University.