Vultures
Your Monday Vitamin
This poems from C.K. Wiliams’ Selected Later Poems. The first of several vulture poems coming your way.
At What Time on the Sabbath Do the Vultures Awake?
Yesterday, at four in the afternoon there were as accurately as I could count sixteen on fence posts
and branches banking or dive-bombing might be the better term down towards a dead
deer in a gulley
but this morning at dawn there were none none at all as I trekked by so I thought
they’d consumed
the corpse or emptied its guts but no there it still was though I didn’t come too close for the stench
then later on my way back were first five then at least a half dozen more circling over
their quarry
a few scrolling down towards it and how not wonder whether they’d overslept or
if on Sundays
like this they just like to sit around reading the paper not bothering to get up till
day’s going
full blast and the great pouring clouds of chattering starlings are already in flight
heading south
or maybe it’s not till they’re stiff from too many hours in theirs nests or when they feel
their rectums
contract in anticipation of the feast surely still stewing out there in the browning weeds
that they unfold their elaborate wings and their crampy prostethical legs stretch their
hideous necks
and hurl themselves into the waiting air which to them must be a syrupy upsoaring netting
and then as the light in the dearest distance brightens and moves down over the hillside
bedazzled
with late autumn hues and the winter chill becomes something you can almost ingest
they clamber onto the carcass to drive the blunt blades of their beaks into the well-
softened flesh
fully awake now and how be otherwise on a day portending such glorious craving and
fulfillment?
C.K. Williams
Love how he makes them almost lazy and human first, overslept on a Sunday, and then reminds you what glorious craving really means. Holy and hideous at the same time.
How interesting. And coincidental. Last week an elk died in a gully below our home and we watched the vultures line up in all the trees around our home waiting for their turn at the feast as the body itself was covered in wings and beaks. Then the coyotes would come and wrestle away bit of the flesh, as others ran around mad with desire, howling. Today, there's nothing left but bones and hide and that sickening stench. My husband cut away the antlers and stuck them up on a fence post where I catch glimpses of it out of my kitchen window. It always gives me a brief start, thinking its the elk itself standing there by the fence staring back at me. Maybe I'll write a poem about this.