Gnawed Bones

Nests, an Elegy

14 nesTs, an eleGY In a few seasons, willows will reinvade this burn, slender red shoots prime browse. even scorched earth provides. This burn the size of phoenix didn’t touch a single human house. But migrants nest here, some returning from Tierra del fuego to this choking land of fire, their memories tribal, alive in every cell. 15 They come back, the goldeneyes forced to abandon this year’s pale green clutch in the hollow just catching. Buffleheads flare higher, their nests tinder twenty feet up. The marsh hawk’s bowl of dead reeds, rock ptarmigan’s grass and moss, the snowy owl’s lichens and feathers exposed on bare tundra, the ruffed grouse’s depression lined with leaves, the great horned owl’s open surface, charred, the falcon cleared out, peregrine along rivers of smoke, blind but rising, ashes rising. ...