Daily Poem: Vermilion Flycatcher, San Pedro River, Arizona~Margaret Atwood
This seems particularly suitable for our Lady of Death.
Vermilion Flycatcher, San Pedro River, Arizona
~Margaret Atwood
The river’s been here, violent, right where we’re standing,
you can tell by the trash caught overhead in the trees.
Now it’s a trickle, and we’re up to our knees
in late-spring yellowing weeds. A vermilion
flycatcher darts down, flutters up, perches.
Stick a pin in your thumb, the bead of blood
would be his colour. He’s filled with joy
and the tranced rage of sex. How he conjures,
with his cry like a needle. A punctuation. A bone button
on fire. Everything bad you can imagine
is happening somewhere else, or happened
here, a hundred years or centuries
ago. He sings, and there’s the murder:
you see it, forming under
the shimmering air, a man with brown
or white skin lying reversed
in the vanished water, a spear
or bullet in his back. At the ford, where the deer
come at dusk to cross and drink
and be ambushed. The red bird
is sitting in the same tree, intensely
bright in the sun that gleams on cruelty, on broken
skullbone, arrow, spur. Vultures cluster,
he doesn’t care. He and his other-coloured mate
ignore everything but their own rapture.
Who knows what they remember?
Birds never dream, being their own.
Dreams, I mean. As for you, the river
that isn’t there is the same one
you could drown in, face down.
Vermilion Flycatcher (Image by Cornell University)
