I am making up for lost time by reading The Star Thrower, his last book, with essays on nature and science and a few of his early poems. It seemed as if a vortex formed around my head, in which I saw the waste of nearly a quarter century without once having encountered one of my favorite writers. Then I saw a blog by Fred Runk, whose perceptive comments you may have encountered in this space, quoting and commenting on a poem by Eiseley. Have you ever laid something precious aside and, years later, suddenly be reminded of it? Then, going back to it, you find it was not only as good as you ever thought it was, but even better.The last book I read by Loren Eiseley was The Man Who Saw Through Time, about Sir Francis Bacon, back in 1990. They were rising and falling in the thermals hundreds of feet at a time. I have seen Andean condors in Peru at Colca Canyon. The end of man, as man’s end should be writtenīy all the condor wings beneath high heaven. Planes fly, and sometimes crash, but no black wing will write Only the buildings edge up through the murk. No aerial shadow tracks the passing years. No huge, tusked beast is marching with the ice, Is out of balance with the tipping poles. Something has gone with each of them, the sky Just as the mammoth’s shadow at high noon. Its eyes are larger than its searching brain Saw the first spearmen on the bison’s track, Its shadow knew the mammoth and he passed, Its kind is dying from the earth its wings

Its giant wings still higher till it soarsīeyond my sight completely, though it peers The instrument of wind it climbs and scarcely moves The great bird moves its feathers on the air Here, for example, is a poem called “The Condor”: The Condor Perhaps as a scientist, he is a little too out of date but the fact that he is also a poet makes everything I have read by him almost numinous. My own personal failure in this regard is with the works of Loren Eiseley. It is a well-known fact that there are probably half a dozen writers that you have been urging your friends to read … with no success. Poet and Naturalist Loren Eiseley (1907-1977)

Loren eiseley poems