So last week, I was driving out to Seattle with my byłą żoną
to deliver a car to our son—my dear boy—when across our path in the high plains
of Montana swung a bird that I had first seen on the Planty. I called out “Sroka!” Magpie.
A handsome bird, sleek in black and white with wing
highlights in cobalt, and a long tail that plies the air like a gondolier’s
oar, it inhabits Europe and Asia and western North America, but not
Pennsylvania or Minnesota, my first and current homes. Its sharp markings
strike me as aristocratic, priestly, a priest with a sense of style, of
elegance, but understated, though he screeches. I think if I were an aristocrat
or a priest, I would adopt the magpie as my totem bird.
Curiously, the magpie appears in the poetry of both Miłosz
and Herbert, but when you consider how visually striking is the bird, how
bright its white against black wing, against the background green and blue of
lawn and sky in flight, it’s not that surprising that it generates a poem. In
“Magpiety,” Miłosz asks “Magpiety?/What is magpiety? I shall never achieve/A
magpie heart, a hairy nostril over the beak, a flight/That always renews just
when coming down.” (156) I own that nostril, but of the heart and flight, it
remains to be seen.
Herbert’s sroka, “Pica
Pica L.,”—the Latin name—is a villain. There is no question about the nature of
universal magpiety:
its song alone
a rattler’s song
betrays
the true nature
of a baby killer
Herbert invokes the Polish
priest-poet, Jan Twardowski (1916-2006), to exorcise and kill that feathered
demon. But the name, Jan Twardowski, is also the name of the medieval
magician/academic (a.k.a. Faust) who bargained his soul to the devil, so the doubleness of
appearances, the paradox of being both bad and potentially good, redeemable,
keeps the
question open indefinitely. In the magpie’s soul, there is black and
white, but also cobalt blue.
