As we stretch our right arms toward two o’clock
I’m not sure what he means
but I tuck in my fifty-year-old belly
sight along my upward arm
try out a position
that I fancy to be the stance
of a time-defiant warrior.
Soften your gaze. He walks over to me.
And don’t worry about the depth of the pose.
Depth, not death, I realize, disappointed.
Don’t worry about depth. So I bend
less deeply, flatten out, arranging myself
into a vertical plane so thin that I don’t exist.
I surface many poses later
all of us in downward-facing dog.
I Don’t Need To Know
Not the name of the frog that sounds
like a ratchet, nor why it’s calling
in the fall. That huge floriferous fungus
on top of the stump—I don’t care to know
if it’s safe to eat. It’s not in me to ask myself
why I visited this patch of land this summer
hoping for a glimpse of the bright blue bunting
that we always looked for in the cottonwood.
Some of the hummingbirds by the bridge
today might be the same busy birds
that kept brushing our arms that year. I don’t know
how long they live, and not knowing is okay with me.
I think I might know why the warblers are drab and silent in fall,
why they hawk for bugs and frantically work the branches.
I could probably explain why the wood ducks seem so brilliant now
after a mottled August. You taught me that, and more.
This morning, a green heron stretched his neck
farther than I ever could have imagined—
but these days, nothing surprises me.
I know exactly why I hold each season close,
as if it were my last visit. I remember
your last season, that fall when we heard
the chitter of the hummingbirds
in the bright orange jewelweed
long before we saw them
hovering to feed.
Aftermath
We root for trees to stand upright
in the same way we want our parents
to live forever, our friends to stay loyal,
our passions to burn bright.
We nurture—or neglect—
that massive presence
and then it crashes.
How quickly we try to fix the tangle,
transform jagged edges
and dangling branches
tame the lightning’s gash
the ragged rip of the wind
with smooth swift cuts
easy-to-handle chunks.
We gather branches in tidy bundles
place them where they won’t be in our way.
Two years ago, after the tornado’s sudden swath,
we wept to see the herons circle and circle
over the mass of trees that once harbored their young.
Can we really know what creatures feel?
Why were we so surprised at how fast
they settled in to feed, how the next year,
they returned to rebuild their lives?
Admire the diligence of the fungus
now awakened on the fallen trunk.
Celebrate its foresight and patience.
Its spores lie in wait
then seize the wet, wild gusts
as a chance to thrive.
Yesterday, the old pine lay across the front yard
sheltering a bat with two pups, furry little bumps
clinging to her breast. We couldn’t read her sleepy gaze
but desperately needed to take charge, to heal
anxious as we waited for wildlife rescue to return our call.
All afternoon, the symphony of chainsaws and chippers
drowned out the caw caw caw of the homeless crow.
Matt Daly
Elk Hunting, 12 Below
What isn’t like this? We make our daily
enterprises more difficult than we must
for the sake of giving memory fresh
meat for its freezer, or to have something
to chew when the morning is colder than
today. We add so much complexity
to what comes easily barreling down
the smooth shoulder of the black butte, darker
than the star-salted sky, in a fluid school
of hooves. Animal stench dodges between
dome lights illuminating the hunters
at ease in warm trucks pulled just off the road.
It is not only the coldest mornings
when we work our way deep down Long Hollow
that we nevertheless hear every shot
in the fusillade and know what is most
difficult is escaping the thoughts we
make, the cold projectiles we lob at what
wild life still courses through what we have left
of the vast wilderness inside each of us.
Beneath Your Bark
Would I could be a pine beetle
tracing my underneath cursive
on the inside of your fascia
not that slick blue bugger
who girdled your phloem
who separated your roots
from your reaching
but this one who goes nowhere
save wiggling through your liquid thump
in cul-de-sacs and curlicues
I wish I could get under
your skin again begin again
in my black sheen
a radiant radical pellet
pinballing beneath your flakes
your scales around your heart wall
not a wall at all permeable
a tub for sap to be sludge swam
slithered in under there
inside the soft side of your skin
outside the wooden stem
of your still ringing heart
Wolf Hunter1
We strike up conversation
across the concrete island
between us. Sleet pelts
our faces as we refuel.
I am comfortable talking
in flurries to a man
in camouflage, but worry
about fumes roiling
out of our gas tanks.
I keep thinking about
warnings, pump stickers,
about the mass of fumes
collecting around us,
his idling engine,
my cell phone,
static electricity.
He tells me he shot a male
wolf earlier in the day.
He is specific about
the weight: one hundred
seventy pounds.2
I listen in October sleet,
have a most common thought:
the world is a strange place
for all of us to go on living
together, full of contradictions:
wolf pups wag tails when
packmates return from tearing
elk calves to pieces, people
advocate replacing lead
bullets with copper to reduce
unintended mortalities.3
I want to ask the hunter:
his reason for shooting the wolf,
the kind of bullet he used
,
his justification for the claim
his wolf is almost as large
as any wolf ever killed
by any North America man.4
I want to understand:
his method for establishing
heft of a carcass, why he keeps
the bed of his truck covered,
why he does not shut off
the engine at the filling station
as instructed.
But more than that,
I want to be happy
to live in a place with wolves
as large as men, to live
in a place where men talk
over warning signs.
More than that, I want to live
in a place where no one
wants to shoot anything
for any reason
easy to document.5
_____________________
1 According to the Wikipedia
article “Gray Wolf,” the largest
American wolf, killed on July 12,
1939, 70 Mile River, Alaska,
weighed 175 pounds.
2 According to the Wikipedia
article, “Human,” 170 pounds
is about average for a human
male.
On screen, the Vitruvian man
looks uncomfortable, as do
the naked Asian man, the naked
blond woman in the sidebar.
This is the first time I have looked
at pictures of naked people
on Wikipedia.
3 Several of the citations at the end
of the article, “Gray Wolf,”
credit “Graves.”
4 My comparison of footnotes
in the Wikipedia articles reveals:
146 citations, “Human,”
318 citations, “Gray Wolf.”
I do not understand why wolves
require more than twice
the documentation of people.
5 I think most of us know
something about exaggerating
the weight of things.
American Robin
Dun flight flares around the corner.
Mate or prospective mate gives chase,
red-breasted one who later waits
on a branch after the first hits
the back door’s glass, collapses
panting, dull-eyed, on the new deck.
I hold the numb bird in my hands,
wrap her loosely in a green cloth,
keep a close eye out for magpies.
Given the opportunity
they would mob the male, chase him off,
whet the edges of their black bills.
My son comes outside only once
to touch with his index finger
between wings we think are broken.
We believe telling a story
could conjure that story straight out
of the air. Her story opens
in my palm. Braille points of talons
tug at whorls. A heartbeat pulses.
She regains her ability
to stand, to perch. Return to flight.
She reappears on a low branch,
unnoticed from inside the house.
No banner unfurls for this act:
saving one life from other lives,
from the windowed door between us.
Our story is hard as glass. We slam
against it with our hollow bones.
We slam against it with our bones.
Eagle Cap Rekindling
We have not seen each other in twenty-five
years and even though back then I covered my
naked body with your naked body I do not expect
you to remember my name. I will speak
truly, there is no reason not to be honest
after so much time, I did not remember your name
until I read it on a signpost as I made my way
back to you although I have never forgotten
the feel of you wet and then you drying slow
on my skin, that glacial silt mud scent of you
mixed with the spare change tang of my sweat
how you washed me in your coldest springs
until the only odors were snow and stone.
You haven’t changed as much as I have
or if so for the better having reintroduced
yourself to wolves. Whereas I am just as tongue-
tied around you as I always was. So I offer you
my flesh, softer now, clothed or naked as you wish
and the admission that you stunned the howl
right out of me all those years ago when my tongue
knew the feel of your skin better than it knew
this voice it has grown so familiar with
so resigned to. I have longed so long to revel
in your muck and reek as one wild body
savors the blood pulse thrum of every other
wild body no matter how rocky or old.
Paulette Guerin
Emergence
The summer our parents split, we spent our days
at St. Mary’s. June’s heat had drawn the water
from the ground. As the sun incubated the air,
cicadas crawled from their burrows and screeched
into being. Males called out with ribbed bellies;
the females rubbed their wings in answer,
flitting on stone statues of saints, squirming
in the crevices of robes or folded hands.
The windows vibrated with mating calls,
sparse rugs hardly absorbing the sound.
Icons looked down from plaster walls,
their eyes distant like someone lost or in love.
Emily Dickinson Floats
the Buffalo River
She regrets wearing white,
the edge of her dress muddied.
Down she drifts—
catching a whiff of charred food
and a faint Skynyrd riff,
past purple flowers she deems gentians.
The canoe paddle
stirs the tawny fish. She calls them cod,
the water clear
down to the riverbed’s
algaed stones.
Just beyond the shadow of a cliff,
the rapids come.
She cannot stop
thinking of the river’s nonchalance—
its only thought, resistance;
its only love,
change. Evening light
shifts the tableau—
viridian and burnt ocher
blend to muted indigo.
Just when she seems at home,
Dickinson pens a postcard—
“How can I stand
this tighter Breathing,
this Zero
at the bone?”
First Communion
The night before, Grandma made my pallet
on the couch with faded blue flowers.
Across the room, the iron-barrel stove loomed.
We learned not to touch it.
At midnight I woke. I’d never heard rain on a tin roof
and was sure what Revelation promised was true—
dark horses had come. In church we’d
learned
about the wise and foolish virgins with their oil.
I had not confessed my sins. Everyone else slept—
or were they gone? Then the rain let up.
The dark turned dim. I chipped the polish
from my nails, ashamed they were not bare.
Milking
The women slipped her head
between the fork of a tree.
I braced a board against the bark,
a makeshift stock. Mrs. Henry kept the rope
taut around the legs while Grandma
milked the bleating nanny.
The swollen bag shrank.
The runty kid approached slowly,
still afraid of hooves.
Smoothing out her wrinkled dress,
Mrs. Henry said her grandbaby
would be visiting soon.
Then softly, “But she’s got
no fingers on one hand.
Umbilical cord, you know.”
Grandma frowned, then said, “Still, you’re lucky,”
placing her hand above her heart
just below the neck.
Morrilton, Arkansas
Train cars jump in and out
of old storefront windows.
A boy in Levi’s crosses the tracks
toward the monument company’s headstones.
A few already have a chiseled name.
I wait for him behind a heap of brick
and corrugated tin. On windy days,
the paper-mill stink drifts into town.
He claims the money beats baling hay,
then closes his mouth over mine.
Hank Hudepohl
Crossed Words
I wonder, looking at the red-headed bird at the feeder,
if it is a woodpecker, or cardinal, or maybe a rare, hot-headed
warbler come to dine with me on my parent’s deck
as I visit with them for a long weekend. I am picking
over the seeds on my plate too, curious about how
I got here, which is to say, living a thousand miles away
and now just a rare visitor to their empty nest,
while my convalescent mom sleeps off her dizziness
in the back bedroom and my dad calls out to me
from the kitchen again to ask if I’d like anything more.
Yes, maybe to understand how migrations, digressions,
even casual addictions can lead to the brink of confusion
where simple questions like “what do you want to eat?”
and “when can you visit again?” can be as complicated to answer
as my dad’s Sunday crossword, locked as I am in my own state