Having First Heard of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker on Its Being Pronounced Extinct

On the 20th Avenue Bridge, a memory
or flight of imagining: I hear myself
saying Home through my spread fingers

sweeping the green deciduous woods
of the ravine. I’ve got the kid scooped up
in my other arm. He bangs the rail

with the pudgy hand not tugging
my ear. Can he feel our height above
creek bed with his gut sense for falls?

His hoot sounds more like inspiration
for flight, like he might bolt from my grip
or slip free from the nest of his flesh

to rise like the weightless soul he could be
for all I know, out over the canopy
into unfenced expanse now that he sees

where he’s from, the horizon cumuli
calling to him like the mountains of home.
Is there music? He’s cooing to something.

All I hear is a plane’s waning drone
fading south. And those scattered cries
from the branches, sources I can’t name

for all my years—winged forms
who could be disappeared before this one
lifts from my arms to find home.