Classic Poem

A friend (better him than me)
has an old turkey. One.
A goitrous bird, the head
like a loading-hook
from a drowned galleon, cal-
careous with corals and whelks; feathers
a dun desert of dandruff and lice;
fan like a shattered snowfence; and feet
two blasted elm stumps. (It doesn't
walk, it uproots — first one
then the other.) Nevertheless,
it gobbles, it totters, erects
its toothless-smile of a tail, all
by itself in the dust and mulch-hay.

But to what end, then, or for whose
pleasure, the production? I
confess tenderness on the point,
likewise confronting an audience
unseen, hypothetical, such
audience as the castaway
sends to — his map-in-a-bottle. . . .

Behold! (he is saying) I'm here!

And the wind takes it away,
and the light. . . . It makes me proud
somewhat for old " Bajazet " ,
that antique — no matter alone
and the last gobbler on earth —
still ruffling his forlorn duster
and croaking his four trochees
to all the turkeys that ever were
in this world, or could be.