Friday, 29 of March of 2024

David Wagoner – Author of American Ornithology Sketches Bird, Now Extinct Bird

 
 
(Alexander Wilson, Wilmington, N.C., 1809)

When he walked through town, the wing-shot bird he’d hidden
Inside his coat began to cry like a baby,
High and plaintive and loud as the calls he’d heard
While hunting it in the woods, and goodwives stared
And scurried indoors to guard their own from harm.

And the innkeeper and the goodmen in the tavern
Asked him whether his child was sick, then laughed.
Slapped knees, and laughed as he unswaddled his prize,
His pride and burden: an ivory-billed woodpecker
As big as a crow, still wailing and squealing.

Upstairs, when he let it go in his workroom,
it fell silent at last.  He told at dinner
How devoted masters of birds drawn form the life
Must gather their flocks around them with a rifle
And make them lived forever inside books.

Later, he found his bedspread covered with plaster
And the bird clinging beside a hole in the wall
Clear through to already-splintered weatherboards
And the sky beyond.  While he tied one of its legs
To a table leg, it started wailing again.

And went on wailing as if toward cypress groves
while the artist drew and tinted on fine vellum
Its red cockade, gray claws, and sepia eyes
From which a white edge flowed to the lame wing
Like light flying and ended there in blackness.

He drew and studied for days, eating and dreaming
Fitfully through the dancing and loud drumming
Of an ivory bill that refused pecans and beetles,
Chestnuts and sweet-sour fruit of magnolias,
Riddling his table, slashing his fingers, wailing.

He watched it die, he said, with great regret.


Leave a comment


Armed with Visions is an all volunteer non-commercial community website dedicated to distributing educational "compilations" in the field of Deep Ecology. This website may contain copyrighted material, the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. If you, as a member of our educational community wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. If you, as copyright owner want your copyrighted material removed from this website you must contact us via our contact page.