Poem: Ode to a Turkey Vulture

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Ode to a Turkey Vulture

“The other world is to be found, as usual,
inside this one.” ~ Susan Sontag

O companion of my heart,
I am kneeling at the long
window, hushed with you,
statuesque
gargoyle grotesque
on the cathedral barn.

In this, the attentiveness
of longing, you wait
in your placid eye,
onyx bead embedded
in the corrugated heart
of your featherless head.
You hunger, like me, taciturn
in a violent world. You lift

off into the blue
without sound, to travel
like John in the wilderness.
O calm and golden remiges,
soft oars stippled with sun,
my love, my inspiration,
my ferryman to the flowing sky,

your peaceful floating
a surrender to what rises,
the kitely sails of your wings
tilting, lilting on tides of heat
that carry fragrance
of decay. In this air,
what is death is your joy.

All the suffering in these little
ones who bring you sustenance
you did not wield with talon
or tooth. The pink and gray
fleshes gurgle over the gullet
stones of your hearted throat, all
their silenced cries,
their chests opened, every
disappointed beat and falling
enveloped in your beak,
lifted up, a mercy
in this fractured air.

And long
in the shadow of the tree
you clean yourself. Through you
all is purified. Tonight the moon shines cool
in a black No Man's Land, and we sleep.

Listen to a podcast of this poem here.

Notes:

gargoyle - originally gargouille in French means throat or gullet;
the downspout for rain at the outer edges of roofs of churches
and other buildings; grotesques were gargoyles of fantastical
creatures that were not waterspouts but were meant to scare off
harmful spirits

remiges (pronounced ree-meks) - the flight feather of a bird’s wing,
its origin from the Latin for oarsman

Read my prose poem about a turkey vulture in a previous post here.

The Turkey Vulture's cousin - King Vulture porcelain

 

This King Vulture porcelain is in the collection at the Art Institute of Chicago. This is the AIC's booklet writeup about the piece: Around 1728 Augustus II, the Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, conceived of replicating the animal and bird kingdoms in porcelain. By 1733 more than 30 different models of birds and almost 40 animals had been made, many by the sculptor Johann Joachim Kändler. Kändler modeled this King Vulture from life, which allowed him to animate the creature’s quintessential spirit. Such porcelain animals remain the most vivid expression of Augustus’s wish to possess and rule over the natural world.

See scanned turkey vulture (and other bird) feathers like the ones below at The Feather Atlas of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. 

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