Wonder arrives in the first line of this poem as a kind of spell. The speaker's brother "had chanted its name for days," and then, "voilà," the bird appears, hanging a hundred feet above "our astonished faces." The chanting and the French stage-magician's flourish make it seem as if the word itself conjured the lammergeier. The poem is about that meeting between what we have heard and what we actually see. The title places the brothers on the pilgrim road, but they are not looking for a shrine. What they find is a bearded vulture.
The poem is in free verse, with no rhyme and no regular beat. Three stanzas of seven, seven and twelve lines let the poem lengthen as the bird comes closer to being understood. The line breaks do much of the work. "Until, voilà, it hung" ends on "hung," so the bird dangles at the end of the line before the next one tells us how high it is. Later, "taking the bones one by one up" ends on "up," and the reader's eye lifts with the bones. The ampersands ("& us standing," "& wisp of beard") give the poem the quick, jotted look of a notebook entry, as though it were written in the field.
The best image is the bird's body as "the open book" so wide "it could be read by the thinnest updrafts." Here the reading is done by the air rather than by the humans, and this reverses what the speakers expect. The brothers have "fed ourselves on tales," meaning stories they have read, while the wind can read the real creature. The word "fed" is deliberate too. The brothers consume stories the way the bird consumes bone, and the poem's last third plays on this parallel.
The second stanza loads the landscape with legend. They stand beside the rock "that Roland's sword was said to have split," where Roland "fought the Basques & prepared / a feast for vultures." The phrase "was said to" keeps the legend at a distance, as hearsay. The lammergeier doesn't fit the story, though. With its "fully feathered head" and "wisp of beard," it looks "nothing like / one of those tonsured carrion-eaters." "Tonsured" is a monk's word, and it turns ordinary bald-headed vultures into a row of tidy clerics. Given the pilgrim road, I read this as a gentle joke about religious ritual, though the poem never says so outright.
The last stanza begins with disappointment: "We lamented its empty talons." The brothers wanted the famous show, in which the bird carries bones up and drops them to break on rock. The poem describes that behavior lovingly, calling the bird "an expert locksmith" and the marrow something to "glean" from the splinters. The marrow is "wine-red," "mother of blood," a phrase dense with m sounds that sounds almost like a chant. It also brings the Christian pilgrimage back into the poem. I'd suggest, as an inference, that wine and blood echo the language of communion, so the bird's meal becomes a quiet sacrament. The brothers don't see it, though. They only imagine it.
The ending is the poem's real payoff. Instead of dropping bones, the bird gives a smaller, truer performance: "We watched it pivot, / rocking in the high wind, / then slide quick as a sword down / that long & boney ridge." The sword is Roland's sword brought back, but now it is a simile for something graceful and unarmed. The violent legend has been turned into movement. The ridge is "boney," so the bones the brothers wanted to see fall have turned into the landscape itself.
What makes the poem significant is how honestly it handles a small letdown. The brothers don't get the bone-dropping and they don't pretend they did. They get something unplanned, and the poem suggests that this is what a pilgrimage really offers. Stories and chanting can point you toward a place, but they can't deliver the moment, and the poem gives a sharp, unsentimental picture of the difference.