By John Shoptaw

Chimerical, the rhinoceros egret,
its keratin dehorned in South Africa
and container-shipped to Vietnam or China
where it’s ground by aphrodisiasts
and snorted by affluent boneheads,

metamorphs into the hippopotamus egret,
the elephant, Cape buffalo, zebra, giraffe,
the ostrich, and the camel egret,
the deep-domed tortoise, and in the Americas
the cow heron or cattle egret.

Ranging like wildfire over the last century,
a migration prodded by the transmutation
of forests into ranches, the cattle egret
writhes and champs and tilts and plods
and darts in cursive at grasshoppers.

And where its livestock gets concentrated,
decapitated, tenderized, charred, whatever,
the Bubulcus ibis or cattleman wader,
capitalizing on a field without cattle,
reinvents itself as the tractor egret

though the unattached bird is emblem enough
of the other end of extinction, ignition,
when not just its shaggy breeding crest
and breast plumage go up in flame
but its legs, beak, lores, and irises catch color.

• Living
• Nature

Poet Bio

John Shoptaw is the author of a critical study, On the Outside Looking Out: John Ashbery’s Poetry (Harvard University Press, 1995), and a book of poems on the Mississippi River watershed, Times Beach (University of Notre Dame Press), which won the 2016 Northern California Book Award in poetry. He teaches in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley. See More By This Poet

More Poems about Living

More Poems about Nature