On the Road to Santiago

My brother had chanted its name for days until, voilà, it hung a hundred feet above our astonished faces: lammergeier, impossible to miss, the open book of its body so wide it could be read by the thinnest updrafts, dark against the clouds —

& us standing by the very rock that Roland’s sword was said to have split when he fought the Basques & prepared a feast for vultures. But this one with its fully feathered head & wisp of beard looked nothing like one of those tonsured carrion-eaters.

We lamented its empty talons, having fed ourselves on tales of an expert locksmith taking the bones one by one up into the sky & letting them drop onto some likely rock, there to glean from the splinters the wine-red marrow, mother of blood. We watched it pivot, rocking in the high wind, then slide quick as a sword down that long & boney ridge.