Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Two Great Auks


Two auks, blinking, waddled foolishly
across the ledge…

Isleffson and Brandsson each
killed a bird.

And the last of their breed gleams raw
and unborn on the rock,

her loose embryo remnants 
sift at the edge of the tide-

line…a shred of albumen…shell fragment…
descends
                                                Peter Matthiessen
                                                Wildlife in America

moon
you continue to
shadow, to glow.
From where I sit
the curve of the earth
against you
is a hunched woman
across your lip,

a mother, a crone,
 or an old newborn
whose wizened cheeks
are flush
 with placental gleam
that will pull and stretch
pull and stretch
in a skin never once
before now
sensing air.

Birth and death fall out
so continuously
that they are a cloud
of souls swarming
queenless past your stone
stilled face.  They do not stop
to rest.  You do
not ask them to.

I wonder though,
if, one hundred and sixty
plus years ago,
when the last Great Auk
was slaughtered
on that North
Atlantic skerry,
you excused yourself
for a moment,
and when that final
 molecule
 of them drifted
near, you stepped
into their exit
and cradled them,
—old new born—
to your cheek
and gave them
a crater no man
could land.

Maybe you liked
the white
moon above
 their earthly feathered eye,
an always patch of
pale on black,
flat and elliptical
never completely
perfect.  They once bobbed
and waddled on
 that sea and clumped stone
by the billions,
sea you heave toward
as steady as souls
whose skin and oil
are a translucent smoke,
that, when boiling up,
smudge the world
with their appalling
chrismic ash
that nobody
ever questions,

not even when
 the last three,
a mating pair are
skun and sold,

 and their egg,
 cracked and smashed
is tugged at
by the unsentimental
gulls and minnows
and the great tides
you keep efficient.

Across and across and across.
A great flightless
shadow settles
like a stone
everyone will have
 to bear
even if they don't
 know how to throw
it.

It is a shift
 of something
 settling down,
of wonder
or ignorance or awe
 of the arrival of finality
and not knowing
what to do with it
except bury it
or hurl it into the corner
of the boat we float
in, the cloud we float under
or the light easing
out of us
molecule
by
molecule

auk
by
auk

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