Wild Turkeys: An Essay Eco Poetry Contest Winner John Timpane After a local paper spotted wild turkeys back in the neighborhood, supposedly a sign of an improved ecology. I want to think I live in the region called If not plenty, Possibility –                                                                         I want to hope We haven’t yet so crosshatched, So islanded these lands That all we can hope for are voles, Roaches, swamp shrubs, sparrows – rags/weeds/ghosts Of former riches driven down.                                                                       I want to think This network (threats, patches) can still uphold lives Emerged into the harsh.                                                                                        I want to believe This is the place gleaner may glean and dodger dodge. Let there grow brabbles of hideout and maze, Fastness found and the lookout, Chamber of repose, home of a moment, forest Like a bearded loin, and unbroken, sunstruck open, Where life is guarded, life taken, Attack claws escape, where beyond good and evil, Strength and speed, judgment falls, Only fate. All that flies soon will fall, that avoids Will be seized and gutted, Starve, freeze into blood-garbage. They should, Despite all these houses, have the chance To take their chances.                                                             I want to know I live in ranges where other lives, helpless in their limits, Assemble their trains of moments, thrust by drive, Trade resource and spirit –                                                                    Like the baker’s dozen wild turkeys In the fields near my house:                                                                    Some peck furrows, A few pitch down from trees the rest just departed. They’re back after long away; a “comeback,” say the papers. Too heavy for their wings, they near grace only short flights. They gargle their cry, travel together. Society is survival, And if they do not love, they share scent, sight, ancient Dispositions serving turkeys well, that what one neglects Another may discover, companionable strategy. Not enough for all, the system is ragged; neither mercy Nor cruelty, the system is wasteful; ends weakness. Winter will turn many into scatters, orts, But some lean into the white-out days, somehow Reel into spring. Winter is always coming, so they guide One another with the best of each. This black, this awkward, These are a sign of health around here, wellbeing manifest In the power to sustain (if by chance alone).                                                               Health is what I want to think I live amid, not balance, precinct to death (if everything Were even, how could turkeys run?), nor health that is Blindness, but health as a mirror Warming with ricocheted light. Health, ungainly warbler, trots alive if ugly, Capable even of a kind of flight, eagle for seconds at a time. When I see their approximate families, I think things could be Working as they should; I’d take that same rough thriving In the swerve-against-will of the world, until you could say May children perplex their mothers, thwart their fathers; If problems, may they settle, or if not settle, not                                                                                 Destroy. Who would not wish friends sometime enemies, the better                                                                                 To recover; Wish February never postponed the myth of April                                                            And April never surprised? Health is the gift of persistence in the inexactitude                                                           Of circumstance, And I, who am not healthy, still believe I can                                                           Return to shouldering . . . The place in the backyard where you can stand and see                                                           The sweep of it all, Taste what is well, what is very well.