One set of car keys. One quarter, green and salt-pocked.
Egg case of the left-handed whelk, black egg cases of skates; sea lace, the sandy nests of the moon snail, not one without its break in the circle; once, after a windy night, a drenched sea mouse.
More gorgeous than anything the mind of man has yet or ever will imagine, a moth, Hyalophora cecropia, in the first morning of its long death. I think of Thoreau’s description of one he found in the Concord woods: “it looked like a young emperor just donning the most splendid robes that ever emperor wore ….” The wings are six inches across, and no part of them is without an extraordinary elaboration of design—swirls, circles, and lines, brief and shaped like lightning. Upon its taut understructure, the wings are powdery and hairy, like the finest fur closely shorn. White and cream and black, and a silver-blue, wine red and rust red, a light brown here and a darker brown there and still a deeper brown elsewhere, not to speak of the snowy white of the body’s cylinder, and the stripes of the body, and the red fringe of the body, and the rust-colored legs, and the black plumes of the antennae. Once it was the hungry green worm. Then it flew, through the bottleneck of the deepest sleep, through the nets of the wind, into the warm field. And now it is the bright trash of the past, its emptiness perfect, and terrible.
Coyote in the Dark, Coyotes Remembered
The darkest thing
met me in the dark.
It was only a face
and a brace of teeth
that held no words,
though I felt a salty breath
sighing in my direction.
Once, in an autumn that is long gone,
I was down on my knees
in the cranberry bog
and heard, in that lonely place,
two voices coming down the hill,
and I was thrilled
to be granted this secret,
that the coyotes, walking together
can talk together,
for I thought, what else could it be?
And even though what emerged
were two young women, two-legged for sure
and not at all aware of me,
their nimble, young women tongues
telling and answering,
and though I knew
I had believed something probably not true,
yet it was wonderful
to have believed it.
And it has stayed with me
as a present once given is forever given.
Easy and happy they sounded,
those two maidens of the wilderness
from which we have—
who knows to what furious, pitiful extent—
banished ourselves.
Turtle
Now I see it—
it nudges with its bulldog head
the slippery stems of the lilies, making them tremble;
and now it noses along in the wake of the little brown teal
who is leading her soft children
from one side of the pond to the other; she keeps
close to the edge
and they follow closely, the good children—
the tender children,
the sweet children, dangling their pretty feet
into the darkness.
And now will come—I can count on it—the murky splash,
the certain victory
of that pink and gassy mouth, and the frantic
circling of the hen while the rest of the chicks
flare away over the water and into the reeds, and my heart
will be most mournful
on their account. But, listen,
what’s important?
Nothing’s important
except that the great and cruel mystery of the world,
of which this is a part,
not be denied. Once,
I happened to see, on a city street, in summer,
a dusty, fouled turtle plodding along—
a snapper—
broken out I suppose from some backyard cage—
and I knew what I had to do—
I looked it right in the eyes, and I caught it—
I put it, like a small mountain range,
into a knapsack, and I took it out
of the city, and I let it
down into the dark pond, into
the cool water,
and the light of the lilies,
to live.
The Other Kingdoms
Consider the other kingdoms. The
trees, for example, with their mellow-sounding
titles: oak, aspen, willow.
Or the snow, for which the peoples of the north
have dozens of words to describe its
different arrivals. Or the creatures, with their
thick fur, their shy and wordless gaze. Their
infallible sense of what their lives
are meant to be. Thus the world
grows rich, grows wild, and you too,
grow rich, grow sweetly wild, as you too
were born to be.
Swimming with Otter
I am watching otter, how he
plays in the water, how he
displays brave underside to the
wave-washings, how he
breathes in descent trailing sudden
strings of pearls that tell
almost, but never quite, where he is
apt to rise—how he is
gone, gone, so long I despair of him, then he
trims, wetly, up the far shore and if he
looks back he is surely
laughing. I too have taken
my self into this
summer lake, where the leaves of the trees
almost touch, where peace comes
in the generosity of water, and I have
reached out into the loveliness and I have
floated on my flat back to think out
a poem or two, not by any means fluid but,
dear God, as you have made me, my only quickness.
Black Snake
I startled a young black snake: he
flew over the grass and hid his face
under a leaf, the rest of him in plain sight.
Little brother, often I’ve done the same.
Five A.M. in the Pinewoods
I’d seen
their hoofprints in the deep
needles and knew
they ended the long night
under the pines, walking
like two mute
and beautiful women toward
the deeper woods, so I
got up in the dark and
went there. They came
slowly down the hill
and looked at me sitting under
the blue trees, shyly
they stepped
closer and stared
from under their thick lashes and even
nibbled some damp
tassels of weeds. This
is not a poem about a dream,
though it could be.
This is a poem about the world
that is ours, or could be.
Finally
one of them—I swear it!—
would have come to my arms.
But the other
stamped sharp hoof in the
pine needles like
the tap of sanity,
and they went off together through
the trees. When I woke
I was alone,
I was thinking:
so this is how you swim inward,
so this is how you flow outward,
so this is how you pray.
Humpbacks
There is, all around us,
this country
of original fire.
You know what I mean.
The sky, after all, stops at nothing, so something
has to be holding
our bodies
in its rich and
timeless stables or else
we would fly away.
Off Stellwagen
off the Cape,
the humpbacks rise. Carrying their tonnage
of barnacles and joy
they leap through the water, they nuzzle back under it
like children
at play.
They sing, too.
And not for any reason
you can’t imagine.
Three of them
rise to the surface near the bow of the boat,
then dive
deeply, their huge scarred flukes
tipped to the air.
We wait, not knowing
just where it will happen; suddenly
they smash through the surface, someone begins
shouting for joy and you realize
it is yourself as they surge
upward and you see for the first time
how huge they are, as they breach,
and dive, and breach again
through the shining blue flowers
of the split water and you see them
for some unbelievable
part of a moment against the sky—
like nothing you’ve ever imagined—
like the myth of the fifth morning galloping
out of darkness, pouring
heavenward, spinning; then
they crash back under those black silks
and we all fall back
together into that wet fire, you
know what I mean.
I know a captain who has seen them
playing with seaweed, swimming
through the green islands, tossing
the slippery branches into the air.
I know a whale that will come to the boat whenever
she can, and nudge it gently along the bow
with her long flipper.
I know several lives worth living.
Listen, whatever it is you try
to do with your life, nothing will ever dazzle you
like the dreams of your body,
its spirit
longing to fly while the dead-weight bones
toss their dark mane and hurry
back into the fields of glittering fire
where everything,
even the great whale,
throbs with song.
Moles
Under the leaves, under
the first loose
levels of earth
they’re there—quick
as beetles, blind
as bats, shy
as hares but seen
less than these—
traveling
among the pale girders
of appleroot,
rockshelf, nests
of insects and black
pastures of bulbs
peppery and packed full
of the sweetest food:
spring flowers.
Field after field
you can see the traceries
of their long
lonely walks, then
the rains blur
even this frail
hint of them—
so excitable,
so plush,
so willing to continue
generation after generation
accomplishing nothing
but their brief physical lives
as they live and die,
pushing and shoving
with their stubborn muzzles against
the whole earth,
finding it
delicious.
The Snow Cricket
Just beyond the leaves and the white faces
of the lilies,
I saw the wings
of the green snow cricket
as it went flying
from vine to vine,
searching, then finding a shadowed place in which
to sit and sing—
and by singing I mean, in this instance,
not just the work of the little mouth-cave,
but of every enfoldment of the body—
a singing that has no words
or a single bar of music
or anything more, in fact, than one repeated
rippling phrase
built of loneliness
and its consequences: longing
and hope.
Pale and humped,
the snow cricket sat all evening
in a leafy hut, in the honeysuckle.
It was trembling
with the force
of its crying out,
and in truth I couldn’t wait to see if another would come to it
for fear that it wouldn’t,
and I wouldn’t be able to bear it.
I wished it good luck, with all my heart,
and went back over the lawn, to where the lilies were standing
on their calm, cob feet,
each in the ease
of a single, waxy body
breathing contentedly in the chill night air;
and I swear I pitied them, as I looked down
into the theater of their perfect faces—
that frozen, bottomless glare.
Whelks
Here are the perfect
fans of the scallops,
quahogs, and weedy mussels
still holding their orange fruit—
and here are the whelks—
whirlwinds,
each the size of a fist,
but always cracked and broken—
clearly they have been traveling
under the sky-blue waves
for a long time.
All my life
I have been restless—
I have felt there is something
more wonderful than gloss—
than wholeness—
than staying at home.
I have not been sure what it is.
But every morning on the wide shore
to look for the whelks, whose edges
have rubbed so long against the world
they have snapped and crumbled—
they have almost vanished,
with the last relinquishing
of their unrepeatable energy,
back into everything else.
When I find one
I hold it in my hand,
I look out over that shaking fire,
I shut my eyes. Not often,
but now and again there’s a moment
when the heart cries aloud:
yes, I am willing to be
that wild darkness,
that long, blue body of light.
A Meeting
She steps into the dark swamp
where the long wait ends.
The secret slippery package
drops to the weeds.
She leans her long neck and tongues it
between breaths slack with exhaustion
and after a while it rises and becomes a creature
like her, but much smaller.
So now there are two. And they walk together
like a dream under the trees.
In early June, at the edge of a field
thick with pink and yellow flowers
I meet them.
I can only stare.
She is the most beautiful woman
I have ever seen.
Her child leaps among the flowers,
the blue of the sky falls over me
like silk, the flowers burn, and I want
to live my life all over again, to begin again,
to be utterly
wild.
The Gift
After the wind-bruised sea
furrowed itself back
into folds of blue, I found
in the black wrack
a shell called the Neptune—
tawny and white,
spherical,
with a tail
and a tower
and a dark door,
and all of it
no larger
than my fist.
It looked, you might say,
very expensive.
I thought of its travels
in the Atlantic’s
wind-pounded bowl
and wondered
that it was still intact.
Ah yes, there was
that door
that held only the eventual, inevitable
emptiness.
There’s that—there’s always that.
Still, what a house
to leave behind!
I held it
like the wisest of books
and imagined
its travels toward my hand.
And now, your hand.
The Truro Bear
There’s a bear in the Truro woods.
People have seen it—three or four,
or two, or one. I think
of the thickness of the serious woods
around the dark bowls of the Truro ponds;
I think of the blueberry fields, the blackberry tangles,
the cranberry bogs. And the sky
with its new moon, its familiar star-trails,
burns down like a brand-new heaven,
while everywhere I look on the scratchy hillsides
shadows seem to grow shoulders. Surely
a beast might be clever, be lucky, move quietly
through the woods for years, learning to stay away
from roads and houses. Common sense mutters:
it can’t be true, it must be somebody’s
runaway dog. But the seed
has been planted, and when has happiness ever
required much evidence to begin
its leaf-green breathing?
Alligator Poem
I knelt down
at the edge of the water,
and if the white birds standing
in the tops of the trees whistled any warning
I didn’t understand,
I drank up to the very moment it came
crashing toward me,