We went to spot a trogon\u00a0and I began to hum,
\npicking paces down a path\u00a0greater than their sum.<\/p>\n
Milky lime, the river,\u00a0sometimes smoky jade;
\nin the brush, bromeliads;\u00a0red orchids in the shade.<\/p>\n
Cawing to the trogon\u00a0as if we knew his sound,
\nwe surely drove him farther\u00a0into the dim background<\/p>\n
where\u00a0likenesses of birds\u00a0flocked behind the trees
\nand flashes off the river\u00a0flitted in the breeze.<\/p>\n
At length we reached\u00a0the ambit of a murmur
\nfirst confused. From hush\u00a0rose up whispers, firmer<\/p>\n
round each bend, until\u00a0we knew a roaring
\nfalls could best explain\u00a0the din, though its pouring<\/p>\n
as it filled the pool came\u00a0to form a quiet cove,
\na hollowed cell recessed\u00a0within the tangle of the grove.<\/p>\n
I looked up through\u00a0the rainbow spray where
\nmy creature should have been,\u00a0emerald scarlet in the air,<\/p>\n
thoughts of ruby green.\u00a0The water\u2019s plunge made the bluff
\nbeside it soar, but no bird\u00a0perched up in that rough.<\/p>\n
Mine remained the rarest\u00a0bird, one that\u2019s never flown.
\nThe echo of his dearth\u00a0is for my ears alone.<\/p>\n
*<\/p>\n
Richard and Debbie were passionate about birdwatching, for which I never developed a taste. Could never get the names right.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n On one of my several trips to Mexico in the early 80s, they took me on a long hike to Cascada las Brisas, a waterfall near Cuetzalan in the Sierra Norte de Puebla<\/a>. There had been reports of a sighted\u00a0trogon<\/a>.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n Our trip took us through a cloud forest and alongside a coursing stream up to the Falls themselves. It was a fabulous experience but I don’t have a trogan on the list of birds seen Debbie carefully prepared for me afterwards.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n Two decades later I turned this expedition to allegorical purpose. The missing trogan became not only a poem but a poem about failing at poetry or, more generally, the failure of poetry.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n This is paradoxical since “Rara avis” is among my favourite poems of my own, and starts out with a simulacra couplet of meter and rhyme, as any honorable Ars poetica should do.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n Just listen:<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n We went to spot a trogan and I began to hum, I have commented on the red\/green motif here and elsewhere in my poetry in <\/em>Red and Green All Over Again<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We went to spot a trogon\u00a0and I began to hum, picking paces down a path\u00a0greater than their sum. Milky lime, the river,\u00a0sometimes smoky jade; in the brush, bromeliads;\u00a0red orchids in the shade. Cawing to the trogon\u00a0as if we knew his sound, we surely drove him farther\u00a0into the dim background where\u00a0likenesses of birds\u00a0flocked behind the trees … <\/p>\n
\npicking paces down a path greater than its sum ….<\/span><\/p>\n