In Colin Cheney’s “Ars Poetic with Vulture” we see at work a different kind of struggle for balance—between life and death, witness and trusting the word of another, the hard facts of environmental degradation in tension with the beauty still in the world. The poem looks at difficult balance of relationships and how we make connections between so many complex forces. This is a rich poem, beautifully dense, as is necessary to honor subject with skill and intelligence.
Colin Cheney is the author of Here Be Monsters, a National Poetry Series selection published by University of Georgia Press. He is creator and co-host of the podcast Poet in Bangkok, and co-founder and editor of Tongue: A Journal of Writing & Art. He teaches at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies at the Maine College of Art.
Betsy Sholl, MAJ Poetry Editor
Ars Poetica with Vulture
Diclofenac, prescribed for gout or arthritis,
wends into the poem to explain the thousands
of vultures–long- & slender-billed, oriental
white-backed & griffin–& owls
who carrion-clean what the vultures
of northern Indian skies leave
on skinned cattle shot full of the drug,
& I find myself speaking another poem’s tongue,
saying something about rosemary
& salt butter, how my friend dressing haddock,
or how her break-up–they’re back together
now, or might have broken up again,
we haven’t spoken in months–is like witnessing
a sky burial, Parsi, not American Indian,
but Zoroastrian, which is endangered,
the ceremony that is, because the vultures
migrate from the plains into the mountains–
at least I imagine they do, I haven’t
looked it up–to become the burial
& they are almost extinct, the birds.
Here’s how it works: juniper is burned
& body-breakers come, laughing as they labor,
hewing the body no longer precious
to its parts, smashing flesh & bone
together with tea & butter & barley
into a pulp, then calling the vultures down.
Here are ways I can make you believe things
are in relation: this is like, so,
which reminds me of, because. Sometimes
I wish I didn’t need to explain it to you
like this. But you weren’t there
to remember the snapshot of thin blue sky,
& her pointing, Those are the birds, there,
to remember how it felt to not be able
to see them & still believe her.
Remember when the birds in my poem
ate all the birds in yours, as the peregrine
culled my childhood swallows as they swarmed
from empty panes of the barn windows
as their kin emptied from the church in Krakow
that evening you returned from Birkenau
where you found a birdhouse above the barracks
& the lioness poet told you swallows migrate
up from Africa & she’d never hear the word
ringdove the same after its coo shuddered
across the ruins of the ovens, deciduous
leaves. Because birds in your poems are always
found dead–a songbird by plate-glass window,
neck broken, a picture on your phone
of a crow splayed on the grass–
maybe you’ll understand why I need
the vultures to stay in the mountains
eating the offered meat of human beings,
to leave the rotting corpses of the drugged
cattle for the dogs of the skin merchants
of Mumbai. But you weren’t there with us
eating brie & sprigs of dill as she
pan-seared the fish, so you can’t possibly
see how this is connected: the birds
circling above us, years before the poem
where they will fall out of love, me
thumbing through the Sibley guide
to name them–barn swallow, peregrine,
Barbary dove–the birds found dead
on the suburban curb of your poems,
& my calling the vultures down,
coaxing them, terrified, into cages the Parsi
have prepared, because they don’t see
the hunger–carrion, holy–with the horror
that we do, because there aren’t nearly enough
birds to keep up with the rate of the dead.
Image at top of page: The Towers of Silence in the Indian city of Bombay, now known as Mumbai, around 1890. The first tower was consecrated in 1670. Photograph, Alinari Archives, Getty Images