Board Book & the Costume of a Whooping Crane

Two new words a day & sometimes three — cup & doll, yesterday throat
       & hot, hot hot,
the T extended, hot-uh, fingers drumming the radiator. He's thirteen months,
       hand to the windowsill,

head tilted up to glimpse a squirrel. Freshly changed, he squeals
       as inches from his face
the squirrel stares toward him, its eyes a shrouded planet, cloud cover
       seen from space,

monsoon roiling the Pacific. Then his brother, laughing, tackles him,
       squirrel leaping down to snow.
If learning is delight, then gnosis asks unshroudings more laborious,
       the hard unspooling,

the rended gauze. & everywhere the shrouds & everywhere
       the shrouds to come.
The President's rodent eye pulses out from CNN, darting & glazed,
       squinting for the next thing

to lift to the mouth, for he must eat & eat. As the boys sit down
       to sift through board books,
the grim hand jitters up from the podium, class ring
       in a dazzle of pixels.

Today he will entertain no questions, impatient for the killings to begin,
       executions to roll
on his tongue like acorns, berries purpling the gaping mouth.
       Already he can taste them.

Now the cutaway to ordnance & acronym, F-16s snarling up
       from a carrier, the MOAB
& its 21,000 pounds of murder. But here — a board book of cranes,
       open & aflutter in Luke's hands.

& now Jake joining him. Touch & feel, so his fingers stroke a tuft
       of feathers, orange rubbery
hieroglyphic of a foot. Sandhill Crane, Demoiselle Crane,
       Black-Crowned, Gray-Crowned,

Wattled & Blue, Sarus, Siberian, Hooded & White-Necked,
       Eurasian, Red-Crowned,
Australian & Eastern Sarus, & Grus americana — Whooping Crane,
       almost extinct for a century,

numbers dwindled by DDT, by power line & coyote, drought & poachers
       selling ground-up bills
to Beijing and Macao — an antidote for hair loss — until scarcely
       a hundred remain, hatched

& fledged in captivity. Also here, the photo I've tacked above my desk,
       a zoo attendant
in the costume of a whooping crane, cumbersome in bird mask,
       a parachute gathered

to make a kind of overall. He's bending to a nest of fledglings,
       beaks agape & waiting.
Released to the wild, few of them survive for long. The boys
       sift the pages, hands

brailling yellow beaks. The President hisses on, martial music
       seeping from marine band horns,
the snow in thickening spirals. I am suiting up, the costume
       clumsy as a spacesuit,

white silk billowing, the lemon-colored boots ridiculous clowns' feet.
       & the mask pasted tight
with sweat & the ache of my ascending. I sprout Ovidian claws,
       my eyes look down

on miles of stratosphere, the piston work of wing-beat
       & outstretched glide,
the long wail echoing from the throat, the fish within my jaws,
       struggling still, the circling,

the gyres diminishing to touchdown & my gangling
       stagger toward them
who will lavishly outlive me. & from my mouth this rainbow,
       wet & silvering.

David Wojahn
Interrogation Palace:
New and Selected Poems 1982-2004
University Of Pittsburgh Press

Copyright © 2006
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily by permission
of the University of Pittsburgh Press.

REMEMBER TO SUPPORT POETRY DAILY'S GENEROUS SPONSORS... Sponsor PD!