The Book of Ten

The Lord God Returns

 the Lord god returns n the day my friend died the ivory-billed woodpecker was maybe seen in arkansas, a bird long-thought extinct. Some say it’s an image of loss returned as an image of hope, but i don’t know. i’m not saying there was any correspondence, just an interesting coincidence i noticed when loss seemed everywhere. that was the same month a woman rescued a pair of red-billed ducks and their fifteen ducklings from six lanes of Main Street and herded them into a pond behind the faculty Club. Such odd birds that mate for life, the male and female looking exactly alike. all that afternoon i watched them in the pond, the father perched on the concrete edge flapping his wings as if to warn us away, and the babies circling and circling behind their mother in perfect formation, always avoiding one small dead bird face down in the water. There is grandeur in this view of life, darwin wrote. She was only forty. i don’t think she believed in that high Church episcopal god her parents buried her by, but i don’t know what she believed exactly. i believe the Lord god has returned to arkansas, a bird that got its name because our ancestors shouted “Lord god!” whenever they saw it, a bird the size of a small child, its jackhammer beak, a wingspan as long as a tall man’s arm. in , when audubon came here to houston, he saw ivory bills nesting up and down the banks of buffalo bayou. now it’s all sludge and skyscrapers. in his famous painting, the only place anyone has seen the bird for sixty years, the male cocks his red head, seems to cast his beady, yellow eye toward the painter as if to say, “don’t count me out!” of course, the birds were dead when audubon painted them.  Later, all over the South, they flew out of the nineteenth century and disappeared in time. but i like to think of my great-great-grandmother and her daughters fleeing over the ozarks, how they might have stopped to rest their horses and heard an ivory bill BAM-bamming in a tupelo tree, kent-kenting like a tin horn, and shouted “Lord god!” when they looked up and saw it. Maybe they thought it was a sign they were bound for better things when all they were bound for was texas, the poverty of a small town, its sharp gasps and held breaths. Still, they were alive, the big house burned behind them, the land burned, the husband and father, the Welshman Cawthron, dead somewhere with the first Missouri— Pea ridge, vicksburg, nashville—gold plates and silver bridles in the sacks of the carpetbaggers. or that other ancestor, my Cherokee great-great-great-grandmother, who wandered off the trail of tears and onto a sharecropper’s farm, her only possession a Cherokee bible she couldn’t read. Maybe she stood in the dirt of that dirt-poor farm and exclaimed “Lord god!” when her tow-headed husband pointed to the woodpecker in the loblolly pine. did it remind her of the home she’d left behind, this bird whose beak her tribe fashioned into coronets to crown its princesses? or maybe it was just a distraction in her ragtag life, the worry of babies dying before they were two, of cotton crops gone up in drought. She couldn’t see me down the trail of years writing this poem and maybe she wouldn’t have cared if she could. but i’m here, aren’t i? at least for now. don’t count me out. there is grandeur in this view of life. funny how we hunker down in our little canoes in the middle of the scummy green swamp and wait and wait for hope to appear, for ghosts to die and come back as bodies. ...