Big Day
Tahuayo River, Amazon Basin
The birds of the Earth slept.
Honey creepers and flycatchers slept.
A pair of scarlet macaws, leaning into each other
on a limb, dreamed of arrowing side by side
over rainforest canopy.
In its slumber, a horned screamer
made no sound.
The paradise jacamar slept,
its iridescence on hold until morning,
its name forming in the brain of the ornithologist
sitting on the edge of his bed,
lacing his boots by feel.
In the pre-dawn light of the jungle,
which was no light at all,
the great potoo did not sleep,
but might as well have.
Night bird
masquerading as withered piece of wood,
it stood motionless on a high limb,
withholding its haunting rasp.
The plum-throated cotinga slept,
and a razor-billed curassow with its beak of fire,
and a cock-of-the-rock with its body of fire.
Not a feather floated down from trees
with buttresses flung wide
to support this empire
of sleeping.
Eels slid through the river,
a tapir, a family of giant otters,
but orange-cheeked parrots slept hard,
and oropendolas tucked in their hammocky nests,
which hung over cove water near a dock
with a small motorboat,
which also slept.
Not a squawk fell
from the stars in their turning
over the winding mirror of black water.
Fed by Andes snowmelt
and long slopes of cloud forests,
the river widened through the jungle.
Bird with names plucked from jewelry boxes slept—
opal-crowned tanager, fiery topaz,
glittering-coated emerald.
In stick nests around a lagoon,
boat-billed herons, zigzag herons, rufescent tiger-
herons floated up through
registers of sleep,
a capped heron ahead of them,
opening its bill as if to swallow the sun
when it rushed up through a roseate spoonbill dawn,
though dawn offered no hint
of arrival.
Bird names stirred the ornithologist’s friend,
a local guide sitting slantways on a hammock,
cleaning his binoculars.
Names in English, Latin, Spanish,
a local dialect, reminded him
of one of the jungle stories of his childhood—
a harpy eagle, hunting for tree sloths,
sniffed trouble, one day, swooping down
to pluck a bathing, bride-to-be
from the river, before
demons disguised as pink dolphins
could lure her from the world of husbands.
Massaged by green air and the prospect
of so much naming, which was a kind of bird
chorus and balm for their souls,
the men felt their way
down the spongy, plank steps
of the lodge built over water.
Each carried a thermos and sandwiches,
their unlit smart phones waiting with thousands
of bird cries, mating calls, bird
images, bird behaviors.
Their eyes
carried bird beauty.
The ornithologist lowered himself
into the boat, his friend at the engine.
Overhead, a white-throated toucan
slept behind its beak.
The guide pushed off and pulled
the motor. On a limb across the river,
a spider monkey snapped awake, watching
in large-eyed silence, as the boat
purred off towards sunrise.
John Calderazzo is professor emeritus of English at Colorado State University, where he co-founded the MFA in creative nonfiction program. He’s published in Audubon, Georgia Review, Orion, Best American Nature Writing, and Here: Poems for the Planet (Copper Canyon Press). His first poetry book is The Exact Weight of the Soul (Red Mountain Press). He’s just finished another, In the Soup, to be published he knows not where.
Header photo by Cocos.Bounty, courtesy Shutterstock.
