Torsade Literary Space The Immortal Lake (part one)
The Immortal Lake (part one)
Now rose like the deadly rhythm of its prose
So many letters
Sugar in the bowels of flying ants
The bartering itself was such an effort
Ceaseless work performed to ceaseless song
The overseer’s voice coming on
The knocking and the pattern carved on trees
He, but for his flash of wings, has no other plea
The jarring of the diamondback
The jarring of the chuck-will’s-widow
Blood suckers lay themselves so thick
The cloak of them is like the shade
He finds only her dog lying stoic
In a pool of water to its neck
And a tarp nailed across the window
A crate nestled on a hammock
Wood too soft to bear the weight
She no longer keeps the place
He had never seen the living bird
May be wind inspired
The ghost, the numen
Raised to flout the guns in condemnation
The crate is filled with moss and topped
With sticky paper
Topped with flies
He would try the immortal lake
Listen for a plaint that the mockingbird recalls
He can sing the whooshing of the pump
And the motor of the chain saw
Excerpt from essay, Planet Earth and the Ivory-billed Woodpecker:
Dr. Underhill said, if we would destroy insects, we must preserve birds. Birds which run up the trunks of trees, like the Woodpeckers, are of especial benefit. They dig out the larvae of insects from the bark and devour it. A Cat-bird would destroy a hundred caterpillars in a day. Where birds, even Crows, are destroyed, it is through lack of knowledge of their usefulness.
Account of a Farmer’s Club meeting, “City Items”, NY Tribune, 1846.
His ardent desire was to kill an Ivory-billed woodpecker. “I have never seen but one,” he said, “and that was in the Smithsonian Institute.”
Correspondent Amos J. Cummings on General Francis E. Spinner, onetime U.S. Treasurer, Helena Daily Independent, 1891.
The Immortal Lake
The Immortal Lake (part two)
My Curious Reading: Planet Earth and the Ivory-billed Woodpecker
(2016, Stephanie Foster)
Find this poem in Mystery Plays