…what an enskyment; what a life after death.
– Robinson Jeffers (“Vulture”)
One never knows the vehicle of our transformation,
our transportation to nether or aether realms
dispatched perhaps on a buzzard’s back.
Jeffers feigning death
teased it close enough to be
eye-to-eye with a glorious ascension
upon black sails in the sea light
veering over his rugged,
coastal precipice.
On my boyhood, cow trail hunts
for squirrels and rattlesnakes,
I had in tow my wake of vultures
riding foothill thermals—Nature’s keen
garbage men keeping the earth clean—
I asked my father once,
‘how could they find death
hidden in weeds
from so high up?’
‘Perhaps,’ he said,
‘it is their sense of smell.’
drycrikjournal 