Under the Vulture-Tree

By David Bottoms b. 1949 David Bottoms

We have all seen them circling pastures,

have looked up from the mouth of a barn, a pine clearing,

the fences of our own backyards, and have stood

amazed by the one slow wing beat, the endless dihedral drift.

But I had never seen so many so close, hundreds,

every limb of the dead oak feathered black,

and I cut the engine, let the river grab the jon boat

and pull it toward the tree.

The black leaves shined, the pink fruit blossomed

red, ugly as a human heart.

Then, as I passed under their dream, I saw for the first time

its soft countenance, the raw fleshy jowls

wrinkled and generous, like the faces of the very old

who have grown to empathize with everything.

And I drifted away from them, slow, on the pull of the river,

reluctant, looking back at their roost,

calling them what I'd never called them, what they are,

those dwarfed transfiguring angels,

who flock to the side of the poisoned fox, the mud turtle

crushed on the shoulder of the road,

who pray over the leaf-graves of the anonymous lost,

with mercy enough to consume us all and give us wings.

David Bottoms, “Under the Vulture-Tree” from Armored Hearts: Selected and New Poems. Copyright © 1995 by David Bottoms. Reprinted with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, P. O. Box 271, Port Townsend, WA 98368-0271, www.coppercanyonpress.org.

Source: Armored Hearts: Selected and New Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 1995)

Biography

David Bottoms was born in Canton, Georgia in 1949. He earned an MA from the University of West Georgia and a PhD from Florida State University. In 1979, Bottoms won the prestigious Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets for his collection Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump. Robert Penn Warren, the contest’s judge, described Bottoms as “a strong poet, and much of his strength emerges from the fact that he is . . .

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