they return to their posts with their gentle gear-grinding jaws,
their wool thickening on winter’s advance, beginning your
sweater for you at the true starting gate.
Everything starts, of course, with the sheep and the grass.
Under her greening scalp the earth frets and dreams and knits
her issue. Between her breasts, on hillsides too steep for the
plow, the sheep place little sharp feet on invisible paths and
lead their curly-haired sons and daughters out onto the tart
green blades of eternal breakfast. It starts on tumbled-up
lambspring mornings when you slide open the heavy barn
door and expel the pronking gambol of newborn wildhooray
into daylight. And in summer’s haze when they scramble up
on boulders to scan the horizon with eyes made to fit just-so,
horizontal eyes, flattened to that shape by distant skulking
predators avoided for all time. And in the gloaming, when the
ewes high up on the pasture raise their heads suddenly at the
sight of you, conceding to come down as a throng in their
rockinghorse gait, surrendering under dog-press to the barn-
tendered mercy of nightfall.
It starts where everything starts. With muffleblind snows
and dingle springs, the singular pursuit of cud, the fibrous
alchemy of a herd spinning grass into wool. This is all your
business. Hands plunged into a froth of yarn are as helpless
as hands thrust into a lover’s hair, for they are divining the
grass-pelt life of everything: the world. Sunshine, heavenly
photosynthetic host, sweet leaves of grass all singing the
fingers electric that tingle to brace the winter, charged by
the plied double helices of all creatures that have prepared
and survived on the firmament of patience and swaddled
children. It’s all of a piece, knitting. All one thing.
7
The Nature of Objects
Ghost Pipes
Not fungi. Ethereal flowers, the slim stem piping
up through scale of leaf, the downturned bell,
all perfectly white. Not cream or pearl. Translucent
jewel of ice gleaming from the toes of a forest.
Once this plant was ordinary heath. Then came
the day it renounced the safety of photosynthesis.
Turned away from the sun’s daily bread for a riskier
life, tapping deep strata to drink from tree roots,
pulling their blessed sugars straight from darkness.
Disparage the scroungers all you please. This flower
is my darling. Imagine, forsaking chlorophyll.
In my own time I have walked clean away
from numbing shelter, marriage, the steady paycheck,
taking my own wild chance on the freelance life.
And when I walk among ghost pipes, their little
spectral music in the dark wood quickens my heart:
song of a moment, the risky road yes taken
to desire, escape. The day that changed everything.
The Nature of Objects
Contained in the valley of my hand
a wilderness of feathers the colors of ash, moss,
daylight, chalk, weightless compendium
of skull and bones, toes curled to no branch
ever again. A thump on my kitchen window:
Orange-crowned Warbler.
Dead, that’s what we’ll call it. Alive
it was song, migration, eggshell strength,
brittle tundra, a mind for deriving
equations of polar magnets and equinox
that would collapse my big, slow brain.
Knowing exactly the day for leaving
needle spruce ice, for casting its lot in a river
of air, down through the hourglass waist
of the Americas to seek an insect fortune
in the broad-leaved promised land—
but here instead. Stopped by the fatal
invisible barrier of my construction.
John James Audubon, illustrious portraitist
of nature, shot birds by the thousands,
having in his time no other way to see them
perfectly. This was the common practice.
Every species described by art or science,
every name, assigned to a dead bird.
Still life, nature morte: the legacy is a book
of names all wrong for the living. Quick
punctuation marks revising stanzas of leaf,
a voice inclined to a mate’s perfect pitch:
the living can very well name themselves,
have nothing they need to surrender to
an earthbound mammal’s eye. Only by taking
the bird in hand may any of us see
—the hint of Orange in the warbler’s Crown
—the vireo’s faint Black Whisker
—the woodpecker’s discreetly Red Belly
terms incidentally meaningless in birdsong.
The things a person will murder in order to name.
A nature of objects, construction of human
marvel, Nature itself—a place
to go visit, collect some particular plenty,
and then come home again—there you have it:
the spectacular lie of our species.
The truth is unbearable.
The pane of glass holds nothing inside.
Or out—no study of field marks and plumage
can classify life in the kingdom without
the corridor connecting florescence
and rain to ice and spruce, the borealis,
the forest of scent trails, the buckshot
notwithstanding, the bear sizing up the man
and deciding to amble away, or not:
the unspeakable confederacy of equals.
The truth is this wren at daybreak
mocking all the windows of my house,
announcing his ownership of my yard
in a language that has no word for my kind.
It’s singing oneself awake like that—
and just like that, the song gone quiet—
that calls me out on the glazed face
of the deadly barrier, nothing but reflection.
Come August, a Seven-Day Rain
In May we planted our crops in mud,
accepting the false testament of plenty, saying
nothing of the deficit that had persisted for
the last three years, slight enough but held over,
the checkbook not quite balanced
against the foreseeable disaster.
June brought the green beetles out
to hum their heathen hallelujahs, raiding
our waterless larders leaf and vein. And if
a stranger to this country remarked on the green
of our cornfields, we did not point out
the parched-silt color of death
edging the leaves of the tallest trees
and the riven floors of our wells.
July cicadas keened to a hard star-punctured sky,
cucumbers folded leaves over their stillborn young,
beetles dried to rusks on the vines they defeated,
cattle lowered their heads in whitened pastures
of the church of all things
and as one, we prayed.
There is only one god
and its name is this. Now.
Ephemera
And the equinox said let there be light
on this moment of sun-warmed forest floor
from this open eyeblink of sky before
the leaves of the naked timberland unfurl
and cast their darkness across the land:
let there be bloodroot,
&nb
sp; birthroot, hepatica, coltsfoot,
wake robin, adder’s tongue,
Solomon’s seal, Jack in his pulpit,
Dutchman’s breeches,
let there be an orgy of anther and ovary.
And on the second day the winged things
came unto them, the solitary bees
and yellowjackets,
the lumbering ground beetles
and the bee fly Bombylius major
and the lips were touched with pollen
and it was good.
On the days thereafter the petals looked down
and covered their sex,
rolled their seeds unto the earth,
for thus their world is made.
And the small leaves withered to sleep by dusk
and were not seen again for the long
three hundred sixty days of a wildflower night.
Love Poem, with Birds
They are your other flame. Your world
begins and ends with the dawn chorus,
a plaint of saw-whet owl, and in between,
the seven different neotropical warblers
you will see on your walk to the mailbox.
It takes a while. I know now not to worry.
Once I resented your wandering eye that
flew away mid-sentence, chasing any raft
of swallows. I knew, as we sat on the porch
unwinding the cares of our days, you were
listening to me through a fine mesh of oriole,
towhee, flycatcher. I said it was like kissing
through a screen door: You’re not all here.
But who could be more present than a man
with the patience of sycamores, showing me
the hummingbird’s nest you’ve spied so high
in a tree, my mortal eye can barely make out
the lichen-dabbed knot on an elbow of branch.
You will know the day her nestlings leave it.
The wonder is that such an eye, that lets not
even the smallest sparrow fall from notice,
beholds me also. That I might walk the currents
of our days with red and golden feathers
in my hair, my plain tongue laced with music.
That we, the birds and I, may be text and
illumination in your book of common prayer.
Swimming in the Wamba
A man cannot step in the same river twice.
—HERACLITUS
But yes, after all, here is the river where crocodiles
bellied in shallows and I also bellied like that,
half-eyed above the cold breach and half below
in a child’s needy gambol with thrill and dread.
And among all the wily forgotten tastes, nsafou
fruits and green saka-saka, here are the palm nuts
I pulled through my teeth to suck their marrow of fat
for a body yearning, running from day to dark with
no milk or meat, the humming of that special hunger.
The crocodiles are gone now, shot from canoes
by men who know the endless incaution of children,
and these palm nuts answer no animal question
for a body that hasn’t gone to sleep hungry in years.
Still, when I come home to Africa, this happens:
I pull red palm nut gristle through my teeth,
I belly in the river with watch-ticked eyes,
I am small in love with just this fear, this hunger.
And this cold current was always exactly here.
Cradle
On a forest path steamed
with the scent of elephant urine
leading to pink-tusked daylight,
primate eyes take measure
of the audacious hominid passage,
relatives who no longer speak to me
looking down from the limbs
of the fathers. This morning of
the world, deliver me from darkness
into savanna. I will walk upright
hands-first, to spare my eyes
from the knife-edged grasses,
from the pitiless buffalo stare,
from the river of tsetse flies that
rush from bloodtank to bloodtank
delivering parasite parcels exactly
as old as humankind, honed
through all the time in the world
to strike me down perfectly. Make no
mistake: we are all in this together.
Here is the ground for forgetting all
the deadbolted hiding places
where survival masquerades as
the purchased fit of a tailored suit:
the paycheck a man believes he’s earned.
All fool’s gold next to the payout
delivered at birth through a
narrow canal: an upright bearing,
opposable thumb, clever braincase—
the plunder he owns without asking.
Here is primacy laid bare and
trembling on a path through unquiet
forest and longtooth grass. Here
even the blood-charged insects roar,
demanding allegiance to all the
ancient enemies that make the man—
have winnowed me right out
through a billion genomic
crossroads toward some other eye
that might have been, some other
unlucky shape left for dead—oh, I
could fall down on this
road to my own Damascus,
blinded by the stupid luck of the matter:
Survival, quicksilver reckoning
scooped by chance from a swamp of loss.
The undeserved inheritance.
Down Under
Our boots hit the flint trail
striking sparks of wonder
at the choice we get: here
of all places. Foreigners
to this red-desert eucalypt
marsupial underworld, not one
single familiar. Twenty wide-
eyed miles today or bust.
Whittled down to mallee, the trees
retract their shade to islands.
and her joey, elbows on knees,
eyes dark marbles of judgment:
what fool creatures are we,
to work so hard in broad daylight
with nothing after us.
The water in our bottles
grows hot as weak tea, then
scarce. We become nothing
but our thirst.
Become our body
temperatures poised on the ledge
of the one small window
a mammal is allowed.
Heartbeat is the telegram
to believe: full stop.
Elbows on knees we crouch down
under scrub for shade, familiar
territory, hands to sand,
roots to moisture.
Join the tribe of creatures
getting out of here alive.
The Hands of Trees
Maple is wide open, splay-fingered
in joy—jazz hands. Or the friendly gesture,
making a point politely. As if Canadian.
Catalpa, a churchful of Southern Baptist ladies
in summer dresses. Devoutly moist, mid-sermon,
held in suspense as Jesus rounds up his
rascal lambs: the steady motion of all those fans.
Aspen, notorious for the palsy.
To be fair, the air is thin up there
in the Rockies. And sometimes, wolves.
Sassafras wears mittens knitted by
a harebrained aunt: sometimes with an extra
thumb, sometimes none whatsoever.
Fig leaves, cupped as if to conceal—as
everyone and his brother knows by now—
the shy parts of Eve. Less delicate than you
might think: sturdily veined, made for the job.
Redbud, Southern belle—all heart,
no backbone—thrusts hers forward, dangling
limp from the wrist. Waiting to be kissed.
Mimosa, anyone can see: how they tremble with thanks
for a star that concedes to work the day shift;
how they reach for light’s full octave,
recoil from a firm handshake,
long to stroke the velvet nap of night, but with dusk’s
owl eyes blinking open, press closed in prayer.
Mussel, Minnow
Fatmucket, Snuffbox, Wartyback, which
among these bivalves stuck for life
in creekpebble bottom could wrest much
notice from the spiny higher-minded—
we who hitch our wagons to stars?
What of Heelsplitter, Plain Pocketbook,
Higgins Eye Pearly, just so many peasants’
plow blades dug into their own mucky turf?
A mussel’s hopes are small, it would seem,
and all downstream from here. But look:
This is life wide and strange upon the earth
where even the lower orders have tricks
up a sleeve. In this case her own mussel flesh
encased in shell, but now coquettishly exposed
in a minnow shape, with false eye and fin.
Or arranged as crayfish appendages, dangling
claws, jerky gait. Or a glutinous fishing line with
a lure at its end. Each of these gifts, a Trojan horse
devised to tempt the large-mouthed fish
to cruise in close for a bite, or for urgent love—
and get instead in its startled fish-face
a milky blast of a thousand mussel children.
With tiny claws they grasp gills, sip blood, catch
a ride upstream. Then drop and settle on clear
cold pebbled pastures, stuff of molluscan ambition.
One could pity the fish, our protean kin,
the nerve and backbone and brainy upward
mobility of it all. But in the countinghouse
of the higher mind and its endless debts to desire,
my money’s on the literally brainless mussel.
Matabele
Matabele ants,
named for a warrior tribe
alleged to be the cruelest,
go marching nightwise
launching their quotidian
genocide on their neighbors
the termites whose only