Nycticorax olsoni

"Ascension night heron"
        ...we sawe such a multitude of birdes of diuers sortes with
        coloured feathers, that the lyke was neuer séene in our tyme,
        the which came flying to our ships, and woulde reste vpon
        vs, so that we might take them with our handes, and with
        greate payne coulde we be ridde of them.

                —André Thevet, The New Found Worlde, or Antarctike (1568)

A florid holography, the seabirds
turning, ink-dark and mutable as rain,
splutters of Ascension-blue: Isle of Gyres
some sailor once improbably mistook
for the mind of a god, a Poseidon-
of-the-South-Atlantic's all-composing
thought, by votive flock lighted and lighting.

Small deaths diminished him.
                                                Rat-black shadows
cast of men outlived their masters, teeming
shoreward, ship-borne. The island laid its feast
for vermin.
                    A familiar story.

From what aery contemplations welter
on the wing-troubled cliffs, we cannot cull
the heron's song, nor figure the flourish
it swept across the moon's blind eye, haunting
seawater's pale break like a history.

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Copyright © 2022 Nathan Manley All rights reserved
from Ecology of the Afterlife
Split Rock Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission