VI
1
On Signy Island, in the South Polar Seas,
we stole among large, addled fur seals
whose warnings gurgled like water
down a drain, as they charged and bluffed,
then climbed through dense rookeries
of chinstrap penguins
dressed and moving like Kabuki dancers,
scrawmed on hands and knees over ledges,
searching for the Antarctic prion,
a gray-white bird that sieves for krill
and nests deep within overlapping rocks.
Crouching, we could see downy fluff
and one eye, lit like polished ebony,
sparkling from a dim, slanted hole.
Bob and Peter stretched their long arms
into her den; clean up to the shoulders,
they swiveled, yearned, hung upside
down like chickadees, grasping blind.
“Priout, it should be called,” Bob said,
gave up at last, and the men climbed on.
Stripping down, I tilted my arm into her den,
plunged full, twisted, touched her sudden beak,
seized it fast and towed her gently out,
settled her trembling in my hand. I had never held
a bird before in the loose cage of my fingers,
and there she was: desolata, pale and pristine,
whose tiny beak, when it bit, focused the whole
of her feathered dream onto one sharp point.
The men laughed, as men sometimes do
at such moments. Peter measured his long arms
against mine, shoulder to shoulder.
His hands, steady as a sextant, have collared
the delicate windpipe of a petrel chick,
stopped flight with paintbrushes light as a hair,
held the squirming world in their poised grip,
while mine still tremble when lit by wonder.
The other birders teased: How could I reach
the prion that eluded both men?
Peter said: “Women are more tenacious.”
And I: “Women are better at insinuation.”
2
Tonight, in the narrow log-jam of my cabin,
while crash ice loudly scours the hull
and the moon hangs like a faint sword overhead,
my mind roams the cliffs riddled with prions.
Though I am weak as a breaking wave
at times, more awkward than a landing albatross,
and fumblingly ignorant of nature’s ways,
my heart goes birding in all love’s countries,
takes the rock paths edged with shale,
will climb up to far fields if need be,
because one never knows in what grotto
and beneath which rock lies desolata.
But sometimes, in my eagerness
to discover life’s hidden marvels,
I reach into the tight awkward places
a man keeps to himself, and find there,
huddled under a ledge, armored by the earth,
a brilliant flutter of wings, a flash of beak.