Richard and Debbie were passionate about birdwatching, for which I never developed a taste. Could never get the names right.
On one of my several trips to Mexico in the early 80s, they took me on a long hike to Cascada las Brisas, a waterfall near Cuetzalan in the Sierra Norte de Puebla. There had been reports of a sighted trogon.
Our trip took us through a cloud forest and alongside a coursing stream up to the Falls themselves. It was a fabulous experience but I don’t have a trogan on the list of birds seen Debbie carefully prepared for me afterwards.
Two decades later I turned this expedition to allegorical purpose. The missing trogan became not only a poem but a poem about failing at poetry or, more generally, the failure of poetry.
This is paradoxical since “Rara avis” is among my favourite poems of my own, and starts out with a simulacra couplet of meter and rhyme, as any honorable Ars poetica should do.
