It must take a certain manic energy, for an Arctic Tern to travel
25,000 miles a year, over every ocean and near every continent
on Earth, as though there were no borders, no checkpoints, no
pitched battles between uniformed dots moving insignificantly
below. Or maybe it’s a certain flamboyance, an embellishment
like a flying buttress on a skyscraper. What it isn’t is mere survival.
When the first Tern found its wings, 30-inches tip-to-tip, found
the ease with which it could fly pole-to-pole, realized it had the
power to defy darkness, it must have felt like I, that first
time I uttered the word poet, awestruck that one could be
so free of what seemed unalterable, immovable: the shackles
we are told, and shown, we are born with, a life circumscribed
by rules and edicts. A teacher once told me to get my head out
of out of the clouds, to memorize the date King Ferdinand died;
when I refused, he confiscated my copy of Leaves of Grass, yet
I kept reciting the verse, openly, like a dare to confiscate poetry
itself. He didn’t know I’m immortal, that I’ve only ever belonged with
the Tern, not chasing the sun, like him, but, perched on a shelf of blue
-white ice, catching the warmth in my beak and swallowing it whole.