Your coat is sable, fitted, glossy with the silken sheen of wear,
wings patched with lightning flashes drawing eyes to your flight.
Your narrow face is lined, creased with white from eye to ear,
from beak to cheek, your bill a sharp point pinched
in a thin visage, between shoulders hunched and bent
before the trunk of your dense intent. Your throat is a scrape
of scarlet, raw, nearly bloody. Your belly is yellow, or generously,
gold, brilliant, gleaming among the boles, but you keep your color
close to the conifers you prefer, delicate and perched
between the lofty and lower forest stories. Your head looks black
and greasy, maybe a trick of the light, within and without.
Your voice is a plain loud horror, a screech declining
to a raspy wheeze, but you are heard from afar. For food, you bang
your beak on bark, punching shallow rows of holes that weep
sugar, leave the wounds wide, and return to sip sap and feast
on bugs stuck in the sticky flow seeping into the dim light
beneath leaves. No match for each other, your mate seems nothing
to you, looks nothing like you, dotted, striped, barely gilded of gut,
and even you barely recognize the downcast brown
of her feathered head. Together, you nest and breed in holes drilled
into the trees that feed you. Young, you were duller and dined
with more magnificent birds. Mature, among the drab press
of flapping professors overlapping your range, you are like
in scholarly bent yet fixed on different boles, similar in academic
attention to caudex, phloem, xylem, equally surreptitious
in treks to novel sapwells. For years, drab and plentiful, you lived
comfortably beneath renown, known only in notes of naturalists,
and by the one whose name you bear, an explorer who cared enough
to leave a title but not enough for your feathered flitting,
one forging ahead instead to erect lighthouses on distant coasts
you never reach, who left you only western woods.
—
Eric Paul Shaffer is author of eight volumes of poetry, most recently Green Leaves: Selected & New Poems. Others include Even Further West; A Million-Dollar Bill; Lāhaina Noon; and Portable Planet. More than 650 individual poems appear in over 300 reviews in the USA, Australia, Canada, England, Ireland, Japan, New Zealand, Nicaragua, India, Iran, Scotland, Singapore, and Wales. Shaffer lives on Oʻahu with his magnificent other Veronica and a delightful little dog named Kona.
