Flamingo Watching
(by Kay Ryan) (published in 1994) Wherever the flamingo goes, she brings a city’s worth of furbelows. She seems unnatural by nature— too vivid and peculiar a structure to be pretty, and flexible to the point of oddity. Perched on those legs, anything she does seems like an act. Descending on her egg or draping her head along her back, she’s too exact and sinuous to convince an audience she’s serious. The natural elect, they think, would be less pink, less able to relax their necks, less flamboyant in general. They privately expect that it’s some poorly jointed bland grey animal with mitts for hands whom God protects. (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43495/flamingo-watching) |
American Flamingo
(by Greg Pape) I know he shot them to know them. I did not know the eyes of the flamingo are blue, a deep live blue. And the tongue is lined with many small tongues, thirteen, in the sketch by Audubon, to function as a sieve. I knew the long rose-pink neck, the heavy tricolored down-sweeping bill, the black primaries. But I did not know the blue eye drawn so passionately by Audubon it seems to look out, wary, intense, from the paper it is printed on. --what Is man but his passion? asked Robert Penn Warren. In the background of this sketch, tenderly subtitled Old Male, beneath the over-draping feathered monument of the body, between the long flexible neck and the long bony legs covered with pink plates of flesh, Audubon has given us eight postures, eight stunning movements in the ongoing dance of the flamingos. Once at Hialeah in late afternoon I watched the satin figures of the jockeys perched like bright beetles on the backs of horses pounding down the home stretch, a few crops whipping the lathering flanks, the loud flat metallic voice of the announcer fading as the flamingos, grazing the pond water at the far end of the infield, rose in a feathery blush, only a few feet off the ground, and flew one long clipped-winged ritual lap in the heavy Miami light, a great slow swirl of grace from the old world that made tickets fall from hands, stilled horses, and drew toasts from the stands as they settled down again like a rose-colored fog on the pond. (published in The Atlantic, July 1998) |