By Mark Neely

I could do without these turkey buzzards
hunched like crash victims
                      on the water tower’s whitewashed railing

                                                       red skulls

             poking from the ratty blankets
             of their wings. A county over

two taxidermied buzzards hang
from another tower. Their sickly talons
sway in the breeze—

            the only thing we’ve found that really works
            says the mayor in the local paper.

September. Heat rises in shimmery waves
from the asphalt. The black holes of their eyes
trail me as I sweat through a sluggish run.
They don’t stir, don’t so much as turn their heads.

                                    A few frayed feathers shiver against the sky.

                                                Remember newspapers? They were useful
                                                when we lived with the delusion
                                                we might need each other—under city
                                                bridges the destitute spread
                                                them over heating grates.

             I’m guessing water towers will last longer
             and vultures, who only eat the dead. I read somewhere
             their stomach acids allow them to ingest
             meat so rotten it would kill another animal. Like poets

                                                 I said, though no one else was there.

I’m always reading things, storing them away
for later. I’m always
chasing down my youth. So far he’s unimpressed.
He prances along in sleek shoes, pays me about as much
mind as groups of jostling teenagers pay me on the street.

             I fear these old birds
             have a thing or two to say, like grandmothers
             warbling behind screen doors. One drops

                                    flaps twice, rides a thermal
                                    traces three wobbly ovals
                                    over the train tracks where the road crumbles
                                    into gravel. I remember the lines
                                    from “At the Fishhouses,” about the seal who visits

                                                       evening after evening

              a playful opening
              in the vast, inhospitable sea.

              He shrugs off Bishop’s silly hymns, vanishes,
              reemerges elsewhere, making it clear
              he’s in his element. Here

streets run down toward the river, houses shrink
their porches falling in
until they finally collapse. My buzzard veers
over the dog groomer’s, the green-shingled nursing home
the Bahá’í temple—no more than a rundown ranch house—
then swoops high above the dentist’s billboard, a fearsome maw
of gleaming teeth. Earlier, Son House came on the radio:

                        woke up this morning feeling so sick and bad
                        thinking ‘bout the good times I once had had

I could see him banging his foot
on the juke joint floor, then withering
in a seedy hospital.

                                           Well, we got that over with,
                                           my mother-in-law likes to say
                                           after the parade winds down
                                           or the last guest pulls away.

You like to run? she asked me once, baffled
by any exercise that isn’t useful. I like to have run
I answered, stealing a line from a novelist I heard once, talking
about his labors, the endless straining for the right word

as opposed to the almost right one, which Mark Twain said
was the difference between the lightning bug
and the lighting. A few cars flash in the distance
as I cross over onto the greenway, a gray path
winding along the river like Ariadne’s thread—

                                    she helped a man who didn’t love her
                                    find his way. Sound familiar?

              Sometimes I catch myself
              wishing the day would end. Or try to leap
              whole years, even as they spool away.

                                             We used to call this human nature.

Bishop thought of knowledge
as a kind of suffering
a dark expanse
we can only skirt the edges of…

                                    Inside the tower’s globe, an ocean
                                    waits for another emergency—
                                    metallic, unthinkably heavy
                                                        drawn impossibly into the sky.

            One morning I watched three buzzards
            huddled by the road, tearing at the pink entrails of a possum
            knocked into the ditch as it scuttled through the night.

                                                Curious, bathed in blood
                                                incapable of mercy, they bowed like monks
                                                over the body.

As they tore at the animal, one fixed me
in her stare.

                                   Look here, she seemed to say.

            I wanted to conflate carrion
            and carry, to imagine an airy chariot
            ascending from the corpse.

    

A delivery truck rattled around the corner
and startled the birds into flight, where they joined the host
swirling above.

                                   Carnal, of course
                                   is the word I was looking for—

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Mark Neely is the author of Beasts of the Hill, and Dirty Bomb, both from Oberlin College Press. His third book, Ticker, won the Idaho Prize for Poetry and was shortlisted for an Indiana Authors Award. He is a professor of English at Ball State University and a senior editor at River Teeth: a Journal of Nonfiction Narrative.