Blue Faces
__________________________________________________

Out here in the oak-beech woods, they make themselves
up like this, first light: scaly knee-high stockings, lovely
feather stoles, red wattles at their throats, blue faces.
It’s a Grecian blue, blue like actors oiled their faces with
preparing, say, for the role of Tiresias, blue that sees
nothing and everything. Not sky blue: blue of inscrutable sky.
But listen, these are only turkeys, wild turkeys. They don’t
like company. They’re scrupulous, overturning leaves,
taking pains not to split their gorgeous nails searching
for beech nuts, leaving their glistening signature droppings
we mistook first for snails, and they’ve nothing to tell us,
only that they came this far and something disturbed
them, probably ourselves. Their summit was decisive.
They left this brief, this silence which they always leave.