​Soar

by ​Heather Holliger

​I had just passed three-foot high cattails in full, ribald bloom, overtaken by bulrush—grasses as tall as human beings—arched like grand bridges over the water, their tips swaying in small eddies at the pond’s edge, when I came to an abrupt halt. Only a few feet away, a great blue heron stood before me, looking out across the water. Still as a post, she held herself like a dancer, tall and lean, her posture poised and composed. Sensing she was not yet aware of my presence, I tried to mirror her stillness, even slowing the pace of my breath. 

She was a bird of stature, nearly tall enough to reach my shoulders. Her closely folded wings hugged her body like a tight-fitting, formal gown, its layers tucked downward, showing off her slender, green-black legs. Thinner than the bulrush, they seemed too reedy to support the weight of such heavy wings. Draped like a mantle, a greyish-white plume of feathers fell like loose tassels about her gown. Her neck was nearly as white, nearly as elegant as a swan’s, her face a greyish light-blue, lovely in its own way. A streak-like band of cobalt blue burnished her cheek, and a stiff plume of dark blue feathers, giving the impression of an overdone, slicked-back hairdo, a stylized mullet, adorned the back of her head. She held her sharp, elongated orange bill flush with the horizon. Wading in submerged bulrush, her orange-tinged feet just below the water’s surface, she plunged her talons into mud beneath the swaying grasses.

Despite the sun’s blaze, our tiny thicket of high-grown greenery offered something akin to shade. It seemed quieter, too, as if a sanctum, a temple on the edge of an otherwise sweltering, teeming lake. Elsewhere, the buzz of a purple dragonfly, the swish of fishing lines arcing over the water, the scuffling of sparrows in mulberry, mallards dipping and splashing. But in this spot, sound seemed to soften, as if hushed, muffled by the bulrush. I was aware of a slight breeze on my face, a momentary, muted rustle of wind in the trees, hackberry and locust.

All it took, of course, was a slight shuffle, a minor adjustment of my own posture, and she took off. She leapt into the air, seemed to levitate, and then her cobalt blue wings rose from underneath the grey-white tassels, and her gown became a cape. She flapped against the air, lifting herself higher and higher, her wingspan sheering the sky, reminiscent, for a moment, of something Jurassic, bygone, yet present, pulsing across the water, something that tugged like an ache, a longing, as if the heron’s beating wings could reveal something about what it is to love, and to lose, this world. Like my glimpse of the heron herself, though, it was never meant to last. What was left was the flash of a feeling, a fleeting radiance, as she vanished into the ​sky​​–

---

Heather Holliger teaches writing at Clark State College, and her creative work has been published in numerous literary journals, among them Cold Mountain Review, Humana Obscura, River Teeth’s Beautiful Things, and San Pedro River Review. Her poems have been featured in the Split This Rock Poem of the Week Series and in the anthology Riffing on Strings: Creative Writing Inspired by String Theory.

Read More