I watched desert purple martins last night in the glorious saguaro near my home on Javelina Way. I was surprised that there are still nestlings who haven’t fledged yet. They need to get going so they can prepare for migration.

I love birds as dearly as anything on this earth, which means I love them imperfectly. I initially studied them so I could write with more detail about the natural world. I didn’t want to always say bird in a poem and leave it at that. Bird. Tree. Sky. Not good enough. Poets are not children naming things generally and statically for the first time. (I’d actually argue that children are more creative than that and could teach poets a great deal about how to encounter and describe natural worlds.)

I wanted to know the birds’ names, their habits, their struggles. It was a fact-finding mission. But then I loved them, suddenly and completely. I was done in by their delicacy and resilience and incomprehensible beauty. I loved them. I remember where I was when I realized that was the case: watching a house finch on my fence at my home in Overland Park, Kansas. I at once loved that particular bird and all birds. Their gorgeous or silly calls. The myriad ways in which they walk or fly or run or crash into branches or come to an inelegant stop on glassy water.

I watched birds for seven years and kept daily logs, took photos, fed them, gave them water, checked on their roosts and nests out by lakes and in apartment complexes around the city. I knew where every eagle’s nest was located. I watched. I worried. I hoped. Those vulnerable days on the ground before first flight. The slinking neighborhood cats. The poisons neighbors used for rodents. I watched one—a trumpet swan—slowly freeze on Wyandotte Lake in Kansas City, Kansas, when a cold snap hit during migration. My dear friend, also a poet, was with me. All we could do was watch and hold vigil until death came with its white gloves that to anyone else would have looked like gentle snowfall.

I did all this while I wasn’t writing poetry. I was never going to write poetry again. (So much for that.) Did I impose my love of poetry on birds? Probably to some extent. I had a lot of love inside me. It had to go somewhere. Love always has to flow out and out, forever, endlessly, the way Pablo Neruda describes it.

“The Martins,” a poem I recently wrote, isn’t just about the community I live in or the sprawling development on the other side of Old Spanish Trail. Ultimately, it’s about me and death and family and love and the natural world and conflict (internal/external, individual/collective, natural/designed). And it’s about birds. Desert purple martins to be precise.