Friday Poem: "Turkey Buzzard"

People in my family, inexplicably, tended to use "vulture" and "buzzard" interchangeably, even though a buzzard is a bird of prey, while the bird I'm describing here is a scavenger, the turkey vulture. They seem to have grown more and more common in Maryland, where roadkill is plentiful in the expanding sprawl.

Turkey Buzzard

Spiraling like a tattered leaf
caught a steel drain’s vortex,

the sky crystalline, the bird’s slim neck
puppeting that raw, scabby head,

feathers splayed like ragged fingers.
There is a shabbiness about this grim angel

wobbling on the blue breeze, centered
on the rabbit or raccoon dead 

in the fallow bean-field.  If there was anyone
around to see, it might be maddening,

its lazy, deliberate orbit never seeming
to converge.  But in this late afternoon

there is no reason to hurry.  Soon enough
the angel will light, hunch, shoulder through grasses.

Without a call or cry it will scissor the black meat,
whole head suffocating in its task.

Then in a flap like a winding sheet
it will rise in a hazy whoosh of decay.

The bird descends like nightfall, like stillness.
How quiet this little field, how un-heard. 

This poem appeared in Poet Lore Vol. 99 Nos. 1/2.