How to Fly (In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons) Read online

  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.

  Each one claimed by a roo

  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