Wild turkeys, necks jutted out, wattles flapping,
heads and bodies turning, all the same creature,
coming from somewhere, going back to somewhere,
ragged black and blood-red as if they were half-dead
already, chewed up. They remind me of Poe’s bird:
ghastly, grim, and ancient, ugly as Roy Orbison
or George Eliot, ugly as Sir Robert Walpole, Lyle Lovett,
Eleanor Roosevelt, the ones who radiate ugly until
a person begins to lust after it. Lust like street kids,
pants below their underwear, hair screaming
bloody murder, shoving beauty out of the way,
as if the sonnets, the great waterfalls with their tropical
pools, even Britney Spears, were all distractions
from the fierce entropy, the smashed and flying glass,
like bits of bodies blown from tanks.
The motion at the edge
of the woods is the turkeys with horny splay-feet
step-gripping with their sure knowledge
that the earth is what’s moving, not them.
They’re holding on with the purposefulness of the damaged,
the infirm, the wretched, who’ve put all their interest
into survival until they’re lean, coded, all meaning
the same thing. I get this way, the old pain gone
but still on the edges, a damage of the heart
that doesn’t hurt now, but knows what it feels like,
the turkey-head, the beak: the real things that went on,
the divorces, or rather, the agonizing over them,
my mother’s death, or rather, the agonizing over her life.
It’s the surroundings and not the thing, the ugly things
I’ve made out of my thinking, what I’ve hung onto,
my deep sleep of hanging on, while the wild turkeys
go on back and forth across the road, oblivious.