Arriving to live six weeks in the Cuyahoga Valley
National Park, after living a year in Massachusetts,
I came bearing all eleven volumes of Thoreau’s diaries.
Walden isn’t the fifth of it! Each day that spring
I looked up what Thoreau thought a hundred years ago
vis-a-vis what I was looking at outside my window.
The first day, my husband, the sometimes nature-phobe,
reported wild turkeys on the front lawn in my absence.
“I don’t know that I’d know one,” I said. “Oh, you’d know,”
he said. “It had that red neck,” meaning wattle and snood,
those flowing organs and the pale blue smudge
of eye shadow they have to attract girl turkeys.
Thoreau quotes a letter from Cotton Mather
saying in the fields outside what would become
Boston, in the snowstorm of 1717, animals
froze in drifts, were thought long dead,
except hogs, alive after five days and then,
the turkeys, after 27 days, revived.
Within weeks, the turkeys in the CVNP, fluffed
up, strutted like competitors in Mr. America,
flexing their stuff at the females. And back home
in Lynn, just north of Boston, they stopped traffic
at the I-95 rotary with those antics. Thoreau
has six entries. None on their sex lives.
And I saw nothing but strutting at the CVNP
or at the Goodwin Rotary I circled to get to work,
so I probably blinked because I’ve read
the males do it in a minute, polygamously,
ten at a time if they can, then take off, flightlessly.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 27, Issue 6.
Diane Kendig’s most recent poetry collections are Woman with a Fan: On Maria Blanchard and Prison Terms, and she co-edited the anthology In the Company of Russell Atkins. For eighteen years, she directed a university creative writing program, including its prison program. Now back home in Canton, Ohio, Kendig lives in the house her father built with his own hands when he returned from WWII. She curates “Read + Write: 30 Days of Poetry” for 7,000 subscribers for the Cuyahoga County Public Library, leads workshops and residencies, and writes poems on demand for Cleveland Free Poetry.See all items about Diane Kendig
