Listening to the Whistlers - William Ragan

Photograph and Drawing
20" x 30" x 1"
 
Listening to the Whistlers
by Ellen Chulak
 
Eighteen black-bellied whistling ducks landed in the heat of our yard
just now. Long-legged field hands, vermillion beaks typewriting
through soaked soil, guzzling greens, seeds, ants that bite, a solitary snail.
At pond’s edge, they meander an about face — striding as straight
as the white stripes on their wings for another go at the grass.
Their pit-pit-whee-do-deews, stuff the air with consolidated chaos…
 
like you and I squawking high above the Sea of Cortez’s cobalt — just where saline meets saline at the Pacific Ocean’s turquoise, where unconditional waves smash into the granite artwork at El Arco de Cabos St Lucas — Lands End. Strapped to blue and white parachutes, to an eight-hundred foot rope we hear our companions crying out — their cheerful chatter reaches us to mingle with our own.
 
When you visit, I will introduce you to these clamorous creatures,
their enormous white-rimmed eyes, pink legs, gray faces. They don’t venture north where we have lived. They stay in the southeast, Mexico.
I share my whistler enthusiasms with my new southern friends. They smile like an adult does when a child says something adorable. To them, seeing whistlers is like not noticing the sun has risen.
 
This is not like the world I have left behind —
My marshes. My ocean. My people. My Massachusetts Monet gardens in June, but I claim these ducks as my own — my soul mates:
nesting in unexpected places, sociable around a few humans at a time, making too much racket and fuss — except when cocooned in luscious solitude.