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-
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
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
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,
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,
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.
to bear
even if they don't
know how to throw
it.
It is a shift
of something
settling down,
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
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
No comments:
Post a Comment