Thanksgiving

We had traced our hands and added pitchfork feet,

flourished the scrawl with autumn-colored crayons,

so when the tom appeared in Mrs. Dalton’s first grade

with his bird head bald and turning nervous blue,

as unthumblike as his drooped

wattle, hinting at a sexuality

of which we knew nothing true,

we learned the suspiciousness of birds as symbols.

The tom’s noise was a hunger we tamed

by saying Gobble.

One Thanksgiving, the sink stopped up and we washed the bird

in the bathtub, rubbing under its wings

as it sat beneath the stream of water like an absentminded child.

Turkeys in the wild seem penitent, wanderers

lost in their dark ugliness, rightful emblems

of this land. Driving down an obscure wooded road,

I saw a shrink-wrapped frozen turkey in the ditch.

Was it even missed in this plenty?

Each year the President pardons a bird, purportedly in honor of Lincoln

letting his son’s pet live—a moment which foretold

of all our innocent waste, our token kindnesses

and cruelties—this pardon a kind of anti-crucifixion:

one bird saved so all the others can be eaten with ceremony,

with sacredness. At a Virginia petting zoo, the pardoned bird

grows tough among the hands of children.

from Guide to Native Beasts (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2004)