Love is How You Close the Distance Down: “The Godwit. For Jodie”

I WROTE THIS poem for my partner Jodie Williams, for her fiftieth birthday, early in 2019. It feels like the poem—and all of us—have flown the world around at least four times since then. The Godwits—shorebirds, whom I celebrate, by way of celebrating Jodie, in the poem—journey from Siberia to Sydney and back (and other such impossible migrations) each year. They are, like Jodie, birds of distance, global beings, fit emblems of hope in an era of global disease and dysfunction.

These are times when hope is hard to keep. These are days in which all of us, distanced by contagion, are being asked to practise persistence, to push on against stiff odds and into the face of the weather. Maybe that’s what love is: like the bird of the poem, whose home is a circuit of half the earth, love is how you perform the magic trick of respecting distance while closing it gently down; nesting so nimbly and so long in your adversity that adversity becomes a hearth.

“And is it not our lost way they find?”

So here is “The Godwit.” It is for Jodie. It tells the story of her courage and her flight through pain to find us. The poem is for the migratory birds, too: if we care to notice them (and we’d better hurry, for we are making all their habitat our own) they will show us how to make distances over into wider, wiser intimacies; they will school us the disciplines of hope. All this the woman I love teaches me daily, too.

Look out for the poem in Walking Underwater (November 2020; Pitt Street Poetry).

 She was small and delicately put together,

But she looked durable.

—Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

My soul is from elsewhere, I’m sure

Of it; I mean to end up there.

—Rumi

For J.

THEY DON’T MAKE birds like this

anymore: Dunlins, Red Knots, Sanderlings,

    Terns. Summers in Siberia, Autumns

In Shandong. The months of early southern summer growing round

    Enough in King George’s mouth to fly

  the planet north again in March.

Winter’s not a concept they hold with very long: birds born in sarongs,

    Sandalled and thonged, lithe, and way too slight,

you’d say, to carry their many lives’ belongings so lightly

 On their backs around the years.

  Denizens of distance, citizens

    Of the tide—Turnstones, Greenshanks, Stints, and Whimbrels:

Their home’s a narrow corridor

         eight thousand miles—ten thousand light years—

    Long, a threshold we blithely furnish for ourselves. Adepts of three elements

(Earth and water and air), they bear the fourth through every kind of gale and squall, a quiet

    Fire burning low upon a hearth, which is their heart.  

And are they not—these wayfinders—the sort of free we swore we’d stay?

 And is it not our own lost way

they find? So, I met a girl like that one day

    Along a shore, and they don’t make many girls the way

They made this woman anymore: Eyes

  like the tundra, smile like the steppe,

    Her heart a mountain passage, her soul a silken tent. Give her a bill,

Some feathers, she’s the godwit, you see: All a god can know, divine comedian,

    Wise with words the skies read up and down the beaches

                  of the earth, mirth the freight she trafficks

High and low. Even without rising, she flies you

  Finnish Islands, strung with ice and lanterns,

    In your sleep. Her territory, I notice, has crept

Happily inland, her flyways now a great divide and country

                                                                                          where the clocks run long and trees moan

    Low with ancient airs. A million miles of memory, it seems, will teach you how

To hold each moment dear; a landing harder than you’d meant

    Will teach you how to give and, giving freely

all the hope you’ve learned to keep,

earn you love as sweet as sleep and steady as the stars.