Fugitive is an adjective Emerson usedto describe the flight of words’ brief lives,the scurry underneath the wren’s long songthat undoes the possibility of narrative  completely.
In his birdsong-filled collection, Charles Weld walks that edge where narrative opens through the mysterious speech of the world, in the voice of Great Horned Owl, Common Yellowthroat, White-throated Sparrow and their kin, with glimpses along the way of a human geneology unspooling into a father’s sometimes eccentric education of his sons. The poet son brings his resultant razor senses to parse for us both the natural world in which he came of age, and the stranger makings of men: the teachings of Buddhists, the Bible’s narrative, the privatization of poetry, and history itself:
when Mao Zedong proclaimedWe have ten thousand yearsto remake the culture and ourselves–meaning, I think, that our first work,(before details of five year plansto bump up lagging industrial production)is learning to trust history’s unwinding,and our own lives unwinding within it.
