I Am Not A Falconer
I am standing in this field
Holding my glove in the air
Should I whistle?
I can’t whistle
Will she get lost?
Take shelter in a charming tree?
It’s starting to rain
Is that bad?
This is a woolly glove
Calm down
Falconers are patient
It’s very windy
The sky is so big
She could be literally anywhere
Penzance
India
Why did I let her go?
I’m not a falconer!
Do I just keep standing here?
I’d go home and change
Into appropriate footwear
But what if I missed her?
I bet falcons are like Fedex
The second you nip to the loo …
What am I talking about?
A falconer doesn’t get antsy
A falconer just knows
I lift my fist higher
If my arm gets tired I’ll switch arms
Miss, miss!
Like I’m asking God a question
Please come back to me
Through the wind and rain
Come back
Even though you’re free
I’m drenched
My glove is wrong
And you are not a falcon
From Caroline Bird’s Selected Poems: Rookie, I Am Not A Falconer is a love poem focused on revealing the impact of its loss. It makes an interesting comparison read alongside Elizabeth Bishop’s One Art, where humour and the claim to “cool” almost succeed in holding a dreadful knowledge at bay. In Bird’s poem, comedy and desperation are more thoroughly integrated.
The poem’s plot owes something to the tradition of a certain kind of farce. The protagonist takes on a role for which they are unqualified, and is gradually revealed to be hilariously out of their depth. Despite the robust denial in the poem’s title, there’s no doubt of the speaker’s attempt to make a success of being a falconer.
Failure is registered from its beginning. “I am standing in this field / Holding my glove in the air” seems a vague, distracted portrait of what a falconer does. The speaker is soon shown to be ill-equipped, with a hopelessly unsuitable “woolly glove” to lure the falcon down. The first anxious question-to-self breaks in revealingly early, and its answer isn’t encouraging: “Should I whistle? / I can’t whistle”.
As the voice of desperation grows (though it has never been absent), the speaker’s jokes seem to become more complex, and to change character. The jarring of geographical perspective in “She could be literally anywhere / Penzance /India’” seems nicely self-mocking while it illustrates how anxiety feeds on itself and explodes. The “Fedex” quip seems one of those moments where the humour, though it might play to an audience, can be taken as an attempt at self-soothing. When the antics of the non-falconer make us imagine an arm-waving supplicant in school, we’re quickly redirected: “I lift my fist higher / If my arm gets tired I’ll switch arms / Miss, miss! / Like I’m asking God a question.” This female God and the falcon seem almost to merge identities.
The poem’s rhythms are informal, so the use of a capital letter to begin each line is an unexpectedly traditional device. It works well, heightening the sensation of tumult as the lines interrupt each other, and adding a visual dimension to what is left uncompleted in the speaker’s thoughts.
No reader could doubt at any point in the monologue the pitch of the anxiety and the strength of the desperation. But it’s the shift to direct address , seven lines from the end (“Please come back to me”) that introduces a new, more nakedly vulnerable tone, and ensures the integrity of the whole structure. Perhaps a certain clarity about what was wrong with the relationship dawns in the swift summing up, “I’m drenched / My glove is wrong.” It leads to a particularly clinching denial in the last line, “And you are not a falcon”. And yet the metaphor, now fully unmasked, remains imaginatively intact and potent to the end.
