Second Essay on Interest: The Emu

Weathered blond as a grass tree, a huge Beatles haircut

raises an alert periscope and stares out

over scrub. Her large olivine eggs click

oilily together; her lips of noble plastic

clamped in their expression, her head-fluff a stripe

worn mohawk style, she bubbles her pale-blue windpipe:

the emu, Dromaius novaehollandiae,

whose stand-in on most continents is an antelope,

looks us in both eyes with her one eye

and her other eye, dignified courageous hump,

feather-swaying condensed camel, Swift Courser of New Holland.

Knees backward in toothed three-way boots, you stand,

Dinewan, proud emu, common as the dust

in your sleeveless cloak, returning our interest.

Your shield of fashion’s wobbly: you’re Quaint, you’re Native,

even somewhat Bygone. You may be let live

but beware: the blank zones of Serious disdain

are often carte blanche to the darkly human.

Europe’s boats on their first strange shore looked humble

but, Mass over, men started renaming the creatures.

Worship turned to interest and had new features.

Now only life survives, if it’s made remarkable.

Heraldic bird, our protection is a fable

made of space and neglect. We’re remarkable and not;

we’re the ordinary discovered on a strange planet.

Are you Early or Late, in the history of birds

which doesn’t exist, and is deeply ancient?

My kinships, too, are immemorial and recent,

like my country, which abstracts yours in words.

This distillate of mountains is finely branched, this plain

expanse of dour delicate lives, where the rain,

shrouded slab on the west horizon, is a corrugated revenant

settling its long clay-tipped plumage in a hatching descent.

Rubberneck, stepped sister, I see your eye on our jeep’s load.

I think your story is, when you were offered

the hand of evolution, you gulped it. Forefinger and thumb

project from your face, but the weighing palm is inside you

collecting the bottletops, nails, wet cement that you famously swallow,

your passing muffled show, your serially private museum.

Some truths are now called trivial, though. Only God approves them.

Some humans who disdain them make a kind of weather

which, when it grows overt and widespread, we call war.

There we make death trivial and awesome, by rapid turns about,

we conscript it to bless us, force-feed it to squeeze the drama out;

indeed we imprison and torture death—this part is called peace—

we offer it murder like mendicants, begging for significance.

You rustle dreams of pardon, not fleeing in your hovercraft style,

not gliding fast with zinc-flaked legs dangling, feet making high-tensile

seesawing impacts. Wasteland parent, barely edible dignitary,

the disinterested spotlight of the lords of interest

and gowned nobles of ennui is a torch of vivid arrest

and blinding after-darkness. But you hint it’s a brigand sovereignty

after the steady extents of God’s common immortality

whose image is daylight detail, aggregate, in process yet plumb

to the everywhere focus of one devoid of boredom.