First Light, First Flight

(Great Blue Heron)

Quiet moments before first light.
Water flows by, 
making music in the stillness.

Eddies form playgrounds,
swirling about submerged branches of sodden logs.
Detritus dips and spins in and out
before rejoining the current’s insistent push to the sea.

In the faintest glimmer of the new day, 
fog rises from the river with a lover’s last kiss,
a reluctant farewell hurried only by the coming sun.

A shadow becomes a silhouette,
shakes its head, throws sleep at the dawn.
The thrill races along the neck, fluffs the body,
animates the tail, disappears back into the darkness.

Sinews and muscles tense imperceptibly.
The release, like a dancer’s leap, carries the ghostly creature up.
The phantasm glides, barely above the river, and crosses to the other side.

It lifts higher, catching morning rays that reveal the heron in new light.
Shadows blossom to blazing oranges and gold,
deep purples, and blues and grays.
Do the beak and feathers mimic the dawn or vice versa?

A loud shriek shatters the silence as the bird glides downriver.
Its drawn, cranky croak startles memories of another time
when beasts ruled the world.

Downstream, splashes reveal sinuous roiling of monster, long- snouted fish in deep pools.
Six-to-eight-foot Sturgeons lounge and dive.
Their boney plates gleam beneath the evanescing haze.

The Heron glides above them.
Relatives of the bird and the fish, 
Hunters since Triassic times.

The world wakes.