AUDUBON'S GREEN-SHANK

Glottis nebularia

Sighted, his records claim, on Sand Key, an Old

World species

not before or since noted in North America,

thus relegated to the Hypotheticals.

Still, an appealing, forward-leaning shoreline bird,

needle beak all the better to skewer a crablet with

(silhouette so like those aviform scissors I once had),

the name-conferring stalklike legs gray-green,

each constructed with, no, not a knee, a backward-

bending

elbow, a scaly shin, and four talons,

one vestigial.

Audubon the fictionist

monumentalized his subject in St. Augustine,

the gray Castillo de San Marco in the background,

its turret matching one clipped from a set of shots

developed and redeveloped in time's photo-chemicals

since my first visit there, July of 1949.

That image floats and wavers in the tranquil bay

printed a century plus before I peeped from the

ramparts

of a fort even in the 1830s

as much a displaced person as the green-shank-

Hispanic relic in a territory

that wouldn't for another decade be admitted to the

Union.

At a distance, houses of the town, among them

the unpalatial, tabby-walled retreat of Achille Murat,

an exile Emerson had met on his voyage south and praised

as a fine specimen of free-thinking Empire nobility.

The shorebird's brain wasn't designed for such concerns;

but for the drift of weather, or a clouded sunset, yes....

A devotee of Nature troubled even so to paint this village,

its fortress and cannon, site a dreamy kid would later

absorb

before he (I mean I) knew quite what to make of it, on

the brink

of hatching into some bird or other of America-

but not into a green-shank, no, alas, not the green-shank.

CARL DENNIS