Errant Eagle
- Errant Eagle
Extinct species extracted from The La Brea Tar Pits.
You might have died trying to pluck a shrew fromthe pit but you couldn’t lift it,
both of you held fast in asphalt near a woollymammoth wailing
to escape. In the museum, as I struggle to haul upa footed stem whose end
is trapped in a bucket of the goo that held you,I hear your screech—
mad beat of your one free wing, but the bucket’sredundant. No need
to pretend how you’d have sensed the inevitablenow that we’re trapped, [End Page 210]
too. Though unlike us, you were never to blamefor the pit, its making. [End Page 211]
W. J. Herbert’s debut poetry collection, Dear Specimen, was selected by Kwame Dawes as winner of the 2020 National Poetry Series and will be published by Beacon Press in 2021. Selected by Natasha Trethewey for inclusion in Best American Poetry 2017, her work also appears in Alaska Quarterly Review, Boulevard, New Ohio Review, Pleiades, Southwest Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Kingston, New York and Portland, Maine. [wjherbertpoet.com]
