A Boy Adds Black Vultures to His Life-List

In the dusk of late spring,

a summer sun already taken hold,

undergrowth grown up,

birds disembodied, uninterpreted voices

behind a scrim of leaves,

a boy out walking with the sunlit colors

of cardinal, goldfinch, scarlet tanager

blossoming from his bird book,

steps into a kind of clearing, some lost orchard

now a briary of vines and trees

crossed in tangle. What comes next,

comes as something he has never seen.

More body than wing, they lift

their long naked necks, their terrible heads,

then, held together

as if by design, they hunch again

over a doe, the awful exposure

of her white underside.

The boy sees them as a Sunday school play-

the shadows behind the white sheet,

a tableau of bodies bent with unforgiven feelings.

Then he is running with a sudden force,

his arms lifted in anger. As he runs,

it rises inside him again-

both frightened parents are holding his arms,

he is screaming I hate you, I hate you both,

and vowing never to forgive. . .

Now they break with awkward grace

into the air, and the boy sees the extent

of their wings. As they turn wider and wider arcs,

the sun defines the sheen

of white and the darker secondaries.

For a long time he just stands there,

watching how their bodies fit the sky,

lightened now, like the sun ballooning at the horizon,

or the wind rising to redress the trees.

Structure

36 lines · 2 stanzas