SEPTEMBER 1, 1914
THE LAST PASSENGER PIGEON RECEIVES A GUEST

Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages.
--Auden


When the boy's grandfather saw in 1814
a flock of two billion passenger pigeons,
Ohio, he said, was black with birds
days after days after day.

Where they nested, the branches
collapsed with the weight
of tribes of pigeons;
swarms stretched
twenty miles--more passenger pigeons
than all the rest
of all the birds
on America.

So many that eighteen thousand New Yorkers
bit a pigeon every day,
a billion per year in Detroit:
passenger pigeons smoked
and flamed and netted and shot
with a gatling just for them.

On the September night one century later
the young man who'd been the boy
with a rifle in Sargeants, Ohio who
blasted the last wild passenger pigeon
into an historical dive . . .

and would again
be a boy
with wings
and a gun again . . .

unexpected and afraid
approached Martha alone
and as old
as he in her cage
at the Zoo in Cincinnati
amidst the odours of captivity
and innocence
and she saw him
see her expire
the last of a kind.