PETER SAGNELLA

Calling

The soul shrinks

From all that it is about to remember,

From the punctual rape of every blessed day…

—Richard Wilbur

I wanted to watch the sun rise. At 5:15 a.m., I slipped out of bed, dressed, put on my glasses. Twenty minutes later I parked my car in a dirt pullover, east of an old quarry road that runs along the Mill River. The river bounds the west edge of The Sleeping Giant, a state park and series of five ridges in Connecticut that, particularly from the south, looks like a slumbering human. The names of the ridges extend the anthropomorphism: The Head, The Chest, The Hips, The Knee, The Feet.

By the time I crested The Head, I was sweating comfortably. I stopped to read a posted sign that told the story of Judge Willis Cook and his Oxen Road. The road, recently made a historic trail, exists now in two fragments: the first begins east of the dirt pullover and finishes at the Red Hexagon Trail, the second finishes near the posted sign. Cook used the road to convey materials to a cabin he built in 1883, at the summit of The Head.

It is a short walk from that posted sign to the Giant’s Chin. In material fact, The Chin is a series of Basalt cliffs that rise about four hundred feet from the valley below. The cliffs are columnar, rimming with flat, table-like ledges, and between these ledges and the next ridge—The Chest—there is nothing but air. The ledges were my destination. I did not know on which I would sit, but did know, facing east, any would offer a beautiful view of the rising sun.

As I approached the last few trees before the cliffs, I heard a bird. I slowed, crept east past the tree line and onto the ledges for a clearer vantage. I found one between a young, long limbed Scarlet Oak and a young, straight-limbed Red Cedar. Between these limbs, gazing south, I saw a bird roughly the size of a small Hawk, perched on a column of Basalt fifteen or twenty feet below a ledge. The bird faced the cliffs and called irregularly—five, six, eight, eleven. Once I counted thirteen. The calls were not, I knew, the calls that often woke me before dawn. Those belonged to Red Tailed Hawks who were nesting in the Black Oak on our neighbor’s lot. Those calls were august, somber, piercing. These calls were distressed. Rasps. Shrills. Fewer calls in the series—three, four—sounded defeated, hurt. Several calls in the series—twelve, thirteen—sounded desperate. As the calls gathered in number, they gathered as well in volume. Some seemed like pleas. Others like calls of loneliness or abandonment. Still others, in their rising intensity, seemed calls to confront the world, to convey the burden of living on and from it.

In those ways, for nearly half an hour, the bird called. Periodically it turned its head from the cliff or raised a talon and compressed it so the talon appeared a fist. Feathers grayish brown, darker than the Basalt on which it perched, not as dark as the rock in shadow. Wet clay. Shoulders sloped, curved like a horseshoe. Beak light, throat light. Tail feathers streaked, possibly. Dark marks under eyes.

            That much I saw. Without field glasses, however, I could see little else. I decided to move closer, and stepped carefully into a chute of rock. Then, clumsily, I dropped my walking stick. Dry wood rattled against the chute. Wings pumping, the bird lifted. It flew past the southwestern edge of The Chin, turned like a boomerang, swooped onto an outcrop forty or fifty yards away. I heard another call, then none.

In the sudden silence, I walked north along the tables and the ledges. I found a slab of Basalt on which to sit, tried to locate other sounds. The white noise of the Interstate, a lawnmower from a university, the warning signal of a delivery van, the crunch of feet on the graveled Tower Trail, the liquid metal notes of a Wood Thrush. The sun rose higher. The sloping, southwestern canopy of The Chest—Oak, Maple, Hickory—began to steam, lose its verdure.

            I replayed the calling. The irregularity, the range, the length. I was baffled the bird called so variously and for so long, and knew what I heard was unlike anything I heard in my life. Struggling to focus on other sights and sounds, I tried instead to understand what prompted the calls. I remembered the sequence prior to, and slightly after first hearing the calls, reimagined the sounds that might have indicated a physical proximity—my footsteps scraping the trail, my walking stick tapping rocks, the rustle of my shirt and shorts as I squatted for a clearer view. Any of these sounds, I thought, could have frightened the bird. And once it flew away and landed on the outcrop, we separated by our greatest distance. At that point, the calling ceased. There was likely a nest nearby, I reasoned, and my presence—simply being there—startled the bird.

            Content with this induction, I sat for a few moments on the ledge, watched the sun burnish leaves of Bear Oak. Then I heard more calls. These calls were rapid, however, and excited. They were not the same calls I heard for nearly half an hour. Taken by the sounds, I looked up to see, against a curtain of haze and blanched green leaves, two birds. One flew swiftly from the south, the other steadily from the north. One called. The other responded. One called again. The other responded. A conversation seemed to ensue, and the empty space above the valley rang with calls, with sharp, plangent ecstasy. The distance between the two birds grew shorter and shorter until they met in a wild, mid-air tangle, in what seemed, in the moment, an embrace, a wedding in sky.

            After, unshaken, the bird from the north flew southwest. Its wings beat slowly but powerfully, backlit by the sun. As the bird approached the cliff, I saw a small tail curling in its talons. Apparently preparing to land, the bird flew lower and lower, glided closer and closer to Earth, low enough I glimpsed bars on its chest. Peregrine Falcon.             

I knew, then, the type of birds I heard and saw. I had gathered details—gold talons, umbral hood, wide shoulders, barred chest—and used those details to draw a conclusion. Still, the satisfaction I felt identifying the birds was brief. In the silent, animate moments that followed, I thought more about what I witnessed. Again I replayed what I saw and heard, added the second scene to the first. I recalled a headwater of personification—a hunter returning from a hunt, the famous photograph of the V-J Day kiss—that spilled across my mind as I watched that wild tangle, that wedding in sky. Admittedly unoriginal, the personifications nonetheless approximated what I saw, heard, and perceived.  Something like ecstasy. Something like gratitude. Something like relief. Yet I wondered why, watching the fastest animals on the planet fly to each other, those images streamed through my mind. Why didn’t I see Falcons as Falcons? Why, immediately, did I personify what I saw and heard?

Sitting on the ledge, I wondered why we personify. Is it to sketch the boundaries of our understanding, to say, roughly, “What I saw and heard was like this, but was, also, not?”  I wondered, too, about our need to narrate our encounters with other living things, with creatures who, as Rachel Carson once said, live among us with “strange, yet terrible intensity.” Why do we compress these encounters into scenes that expose, build, climax, and resolve? Don’t the subjects of these encounters exist in their own time and space, beyond our ability to construct, or reconstruct, their lives? And while human stories order chaos, give purpose to the purposeless, are they just another artery piping more and more of our blood into the world?

The evening before I heard the calling, I finished Barry Lopez’s essay “Love in a Time of Terror.” The question Lopez asks to conclude—“…Is it still possible to face the gathering darkness and say to the physical world, and to all its creatures, including ourselves, fiercely and without embarrassment, I love you, and to embrace fearlessly the burning world?”— stunned me, was so exigent and profound I felt transformed, felt a clarity in mind and heart. Drifting off to sleep, other questions slipped into mind. In this time of catastrophe and extinction, under the fire of the sun and the melting of the ice, how do we live with dignity, compassion, humanity, hope? How do we wed ourselves to the Earth we rape?    

Though I was not thinking explicitly of Lopez’s question while I sat on the ledge and listened to the Falcons call, I was conscious of trying to give myself to the moment and the place. I wanted to pay attention, to listen to what the world, at that moment and in that place, had to say. I did not know, of course, I would listen to a Peregrine Falcon call for nearly thirty minutes, did not know I would see another Peregrine Falcon return from a hunt. I did not know I would hear and see these Falcons express what seems, even now, ecstasy and gratitude and relief. And I certainly did not know those expressions would, in that moment and in that place, edify, say as much about what matters in this world as a poem, painting, or icon. I do know, however, the will to listen and look made such witnessing possible.

The will to listen to what seems unintelligible, incomprehensible, or mysterious invokes an older, deeper sense of the word “calling,” from Middle English callen or, as the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology states, a “summons to a way of life.”  It is a will captured in “vocation,” from Latin vocationem. To be called. While these older meanings often compass a life dedicated to God or religion, they also reveal our need to live outside the body, to acknowledge, participate, and serve other lives, to feel connected to a world beyond our own, to transcend the one we often narrowly perceive. If we are to rebuild our relationship to Earth—if we are to wed, not rape—it seems we need first to call ourselves to it, call ourselves to water, sun, soil, rock, air, flora, fauna, comprehend we are made of each.

Peregrine Falcons did not summon me to what I saw and heard in less than an hour on a ridge that resembles a slumbering human. To think so is an error in reasoning—post hoc ergo propter hoc. I ascended The Head of The Sleeping Giant that humid morning because I wanted to watch the sun rise, watch its rays pass through the atmosphere and turn the life I knew was on the ledge—Tree, Lichen, Grass, Moss—metallic: copper, bronze, gold. I wanted to absorb and listen, partake in what the time and place might offer. I wanted, I think, to open myself, which is not the same as wanting to forget or lose myself. Instead, I was trying to focus, to recognize in the moment the world in which I was, and am, a part.

Later that day I read in Kaufman’s Field Guide to Nature of New England that, when near a nest, Peregrine Falcons offer a strident “kyah! kyah!” I do not know if the onomatopoeia mirrors what I heard, but I believe what I heard and saw was intelligible, has a human equivalent. Fear. Fright. Ecstasy. Gratitude. Perhaps, to repair our relationship with Earth, we need to anthropomorphize, to extend our perception into a world that is not, and never will be, ours. If so, likeness, as well as love, can call us to this world.

Peter Sagnella lives with his wife and sons in North Haven, Connecticut, where he has taught Composition, Poetry, and Environmental Literature for twenty-three years. A Pushcart nominee and Edwin Way Teale Writer-in-Residence, his work has been exhibited at the Yale School of Forestry and appeared in many journals. Recent work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in New Limestone Review, Shō, Poet Lore, and Hayden’s Ferry Review. In 2023, Cathexis Northwest Press published his chapbook, Coming to Terms.