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,
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
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
