Four Audubon Poems, by Noah Davis

Turkey Buzzard, Audubon Plate CLL
 
We’ve weighted ourselves with others, 
and while neck-deep in the necks of the dead, 
have learned to keep our feathers off our faces, 
cheeks smooth like the ball of a hip, which we shovel 
out of the flesh and hold in our chests like the colour 
of morning when all our wings are stretched out in praise.

Trumpeter Swan, Audubon Plate CCCCVI
 
Beloved, you found 
the moth, in all this water.
Like you found me.
 
Your neck bent 
back for us.

​Virginia Partridge, Audubon Plate LXXVI
 
Terror finds us like water 
                                      finds the crease 
                                      between two hills
 
and we the forsaken soils 
are scattered by its wings 
to fill the basin with silt. 
 
            We on our backs, 
                                        beloveds on our throats, 
 
                                        whistle of ourselves straining 
                                        to outlast the height of our heads 
                                                                                            thrown back.

Great-Footed Hawk, Audubon Plate XVI
 
May we never again eat a meal 
so quick that we forget to watch 
the feathers we’ve torn 
from the duck return 
 
to heaven, 
 
              to sky, 
 
to river.

Noah Davis
​
All artworks are plates from Birds of America, by John James Audubon (USA, b. Haiti) c. 1827-1838

Noah Davis grew up in Tipton, Pennsylvania, and writes about the Allegheny Front. Davis’ poetry collection Of This River was selected by George Ella Lyon for the 2019 Wheelbarrow Emerging Poet Book Prize from Michigan State University’s Center for Poetry, and his poems and prose have appeared in The Sun, Southern Humanities Review, Best New Poets, Orion, The Year’s Best Sports Writing, North American Review, and River Teeth among others. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and awarded a Katharine Bakeless Nason Fellowship at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and the 2018 Jean Ritchie Appalachian Literature Fellowship from Lincoln Memorial University. Davis earned an MFA from Indiana University and now lives with his wife, Nikea, in Missoula, Montana. 

Click here to read another series of poems after Audubon, by Colin Morris.