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 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.