A person holds a stone, and in its weight something vast opens up: the stone seems to become a cathedral. The speaker’s heart jumps, as if walking inside a space of overwhelming grace. The language rises with the architecture—groin-vaulted, impossibly high—until the height is measured against a bird’s flight, and then the poem turns. The stone structure may soar, but it is seamless and bloodless; there is no feather, no bone. Stone cannot make the bird. The mood is awe mixed with longing. The speaker is caught between two kinds of wonder: the human-made cathedral and the living, precarious spectacle of a bird in migration. The title suggests that living spectacle is fragile, and the ending insists that no matter how high stone reaches, it cannot replace or reproduce that life.
Precarious Migratory Spectacular — Summary
Stone weighting my palm has sprung a cathedral heart jumps walking in the flesh of its surpassing grace
groin-vaulted and high as no bird ever escaped to soar this high-up—
seamless and there is no blood no feather no bone— stone cannot make the bird.