Mark Abley: Into Thin Air

Into Thin Air

1

Dr. William L. Rhein of Harrisburg, deserting his Heartbreak

Hotel-era patients to explore an ancient vestige of

roadless forest high in the western Sierra Madre,

was aboard a mule when a single Imperial

Woodpecker clambered up a dead pine in plain view

and he filmed her foraging the scaly trunk,

chipping the bark, her black lizard-like crest

twitching before she heaved into flight,

her pointed tail disappearing

   beyond his ability   

to deploy a handheld

 camera further:

the only day

her kind was

ever

shot

2

Chastened, wrinkled, reclusive, he likened the creature to “a great
big turkey flying in front of me,” his hands quivering: now

a few clicks of my index finger revive on a screen 

the ghost of a younger, butterball man in a hat

who drilled cavities to buy his Mexican trip

and reveal an almost heart-shaped whiteness in  

the woodpecker’s folded wings: how she’d leap

off a tree before briskly flapping

away: if the sound equipment

hadn’t weighed so much, we might

still understand just what

Rhein meant by “cackling”

and “the usual

toy trumpet

sounds” she

gave

3

When biologists, half a century later, found a way back,

they discovered the loggers had left almost nothing uncut:

opium poppies grew where the opulent pines had stood:

 in the minds of oldtimers the largest woodpeckers

ever to roam this planet persisted as half-

forgotten medicine, half-remembered meat

and the trusting dupes of a sawmill boss:

he paid his men to smear the doomed trees

so the birds, using their long pale

beaks to drill for larval grubs,  

would ingest poison and

at a loss for breath

could prevail on

sumptuous

wings no

more

Mark Abley is a Montreal-based poet, journalist, editor and non-fiction writer. His most recent poetry collection is The Tongues of Earth: New and Selected Poems (Coteau Books, 2015).  ... about Mark Abley  ...  about  The Tongues of Earth