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American Flamingo
- Southern Illinois University Press
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79 American Flamingo I know he shot them to know them. I did not know the eyes of the flamingo are blue, a deep live blue. And the tongue is lined with many small tongues, thirteen, in the sketch by Audubon, to function as a sieve. I knew the long rose-pink neck, the heavy tricolored down-sweeping bill, the black primaries. But I did not know the blue eye drawn so passionately by Audubon it seems to look out, wary, intense, from the paper it is printed on. —what Is man but his passion? asked Robert Penn Warren. In the background of this sketch, tenderly subtitled Old Male, beneath the over-draping feathered monument of the body, between the long flexible neck and the long bony legs covered with pink platelets of flesh, Audubon has given us eight postures, eight stunning movements in the ongoing dance of the flamingos. 80 Once at Hialeah in late afternoon, I watched the satin figures of the jockeys perched like bright beetles on the backs of horses pounding down the home stretch, a few crops whipping the lathering flanks, the loud flat metallic voice of the announcer fading as the flamingos, grazing the pond water at the far end of the infield rose in a feathery blush, only a few feet off the ground and flew one long clipped-winged ritual lap in the heavy Miami light, a great slow swirl of grace from the old world that made tickets fall from hands, stilled horses, and drew toasts from the stands as they settled down again like a rose-colored fog on the pond. ...