After a paper by John Wolley, egg collector

and auk researcher, published in Zoologist

in 1849.

There is no explanation for loss. A shovel’s nose smacks the dirt. While digging potatoes, they caught a bat. Band of yellow hair.

On his first trip north, Wolley tracked sea eagles by the lamb-shaped gaps in flocks. A hundred years later, sheep were stamped with bright spots, hot pink or oyster blue or mauve on the haunch. No fear of eagles, long since wiped out.

No such bat lived in all of Scotland. A singularity is lonely; that is its defining fault.

Wolley became worried for the auk.  Its shrunken wings were brilliant if  observed  through  the  plate  glass  of  the  sea’s  surface,  but on land— a failure of foresight.

Twelve years later, Wolley died at thirty-six. The consensus among the society of the Ibis journal is that his brain, like an egg, opened.

There is no explanation for a bird that once could fly and now cannot.

There was little wanting in him, wrote Alfred Newton after Wolley’s death. At the eagle’s reintroduction, sheep flocks fled along the upper slopes of the Orkneys and the Isle of Skye, where the clouds push so near you can stick out your tongue and taste a dozen kinds of snow. North enough that the crevice between heaven and earth is narrow. There’s no use for flight. Pieces of the closest planets used to break off and nest in the crown of the auk’s head.

after she escapes the sky, witch-auk drifts a long time on an empty atlantic. she washes ashore in new england, & i come to meet her there. down the boardwalk a team of gulls hacks up french fries & steamed clams. one is nutcracker-postured with an entire corndog down his throat; the stick flagpoles out his beak. but look,

the ocean always clung to its bounty. unpalatable fish float inert & crooked like boomerangs, the crabs oily in their mood-ring shells. & that there was once a wild-eyed captain who hunted a single whale for years

isn’t  that  impressive,  when  others  made  quicker  work  of  the  beasts. a clot of boys at the end of the dock smears us up & down with yellow eyes.  they  flick  their  kershaws  open  &  shut.  i  let  them  crack  me open, cut out & examine my organs one by one—no pearl, disappointment—toss them off the pier. witch-auk presses her cheek into my palm. when

will she find out about me? a drunk man toddles up to us, says his name  is  gary,  tells  us  his  story,  how  he’s  leaving  town  after  bedding a    woman    two    feet    taller    than    him    &    she’s    become    attached. shit happens, he says. go west.

we’ve read about it: a pacific raw & squirming, mussels caking every surface,  &  the  scales  of  fish  translucent  with  a  grand  inhuman  light. i still believe that pain is a suit you can leave behind. i want to bleach my guts of me. so witch-auk and i decide to go together: toward forgetting.

witch-auk takes one last dip in the atlantic, shoots beneath the waves, & the bent fish wriggle back to life as she goes. i look over the railing at my reflection to wave goodbye. we haven’t seen each other in a long time. maybe someday she’ll be worth saving.

witch-auk & me sweat from our seams & sleep in our dreams & the trek has grown so exhausting that i don’t recall the last truck or the truck

before it, just that they’ve been mack trucks and this too’s a mack truck. witch-auk dangles her flippers over the stick shift

over rubber mats with bulldogs on them over the pinkish road rolled out over a hundred miles of colorado scrubland.

little   use   for   flippers   here.   the   driver   starts   the   conversation   with   where   you   headed, like they all do.

he says he’s bound home, points to a photo adhered to the dash of a woman with feathered bangs, her hands on the shoulders of a small girl.

i say witch-auk has relatives in california—the greatest auk, miomancalla howardae (though when I told her this,

she  didn’t  want  to  hear).  had  relatives,  i  correct  myself,  many  years  ago.  the  driver  laughs in a way that’s not glad, says i get it,

nods  at  the  picture,  she’s  older  now  he  says.  witch-auk  wants  to  ask  how  much  older  &  i tell her that’s enough & keep quiet.

the  driver  twists  at  his  beard  with  one  hand  on  the  wheel.  the  radio  crackles  into  silence & he gets to humming & witch-auk

starts clacking her beak in counterpoint—like she knows the tune. he clicks the headlights on & we drive through the night like this—that song

in so many variations that i never can figure out how to join in. around four a.m., the driver starts crying, tears wiggling

down the wires of his beard. witch-auk leans against his arm. i have moved like a ghost across my own waking. through everyone i meet.