The Poet as Landscape, and: Catbird, and: The Nest

Abstract

The Poet as Landscape Any fool can make a claim to be anonymous. But when a leg enters the stream cold climbs to the brain and he feels general as light watching the narrow gorge littered with old car parts and cars. A river heaves by somewhere out of sight in a kind of camouflage. From broken branches a piece of clothing hangs as if it had just shed its occupant, turning away from him to its own tattered freedom, just as the sun casts its own perspective and cracked shadows begin their trek back in and down. No one built this ravine. Still it still curves away as if it had a plan, scratching a way where you can't tell if the flashing is water, glass, teeth, or the glint of foil. To get in he's crept under the fence, beside Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted. He whistles like a ventriloquist, pretending that time too doesn't have to come from anywhere, not from that snailshell a thrush shatters, that hummingbird who could be anywhere, from woodpecker's braille or semaphore of the fractured rill. He watches things pretend to be themselves. One good shoe, its owner driven off, performs its lonely office for the lost, and that smooth blue slab of granite is a woman's belly tied to root and leafdrift, a phosphoric womb of entrances and flow open to transfigured birds and snakes whose mouths flame. They will not spare him. He moves on. He is all these motivations, these crossed-up immensities, staggering, breaking down to something coming through, a composting of Ford and bathtub, dead cat and rabbit, and gnawing on them all a large black dog. [End Page 115] Catbird Rump flashing in flight, as if trying to escape his own fire, he's eager as a schoolboy on the ground, scrambling in leaflitter, kicking up a brushpile, taking a worm, a beetle, or in the same movement a beakful of dead moss to rush to the nest, running and hopping so fast among rocks it seems he's flying, that rich gray not rock but moving it. To rest, he sings on a low branch dug full of little holes a song that could be the real thing but to some ears sounds like imitation. In any case, out comes a cat swallowed aeons ago when cats were just being invented. And there's the voice of Punch, ungreased wheels of the old red barrow, handfuls of crickets, gunshots, tanagers, leaves. The game's to find and sort: what's detail, what theme? He sits unbothered, grinding out his rhapsodies though clearly outclassed even by sparrow and chickadee. There he goes again, jumping off one of his better quarter notes to spear a flick among ferns and rake through the area, going after just about everything there, or that ever crossed and entered, swallowing it and making it song. [End Page 116] The Nest I'm walking near the woods trying to remember who said you don't own things, they own you, when I look down and see something. Dropping to my knees, I watch fat yellow- tinged bottoms disappear into the duststorms their wings stir up as they push down to stuff the stony soil with sweetness that keeps generations going. Others push up refreshed and lightened, continuing the dance through a rich world studded ultra-violet. I watch for what seem hours, silent, so to them I'm maybe an unflowered tree, dull bark, or bank. I watch until the mapled dark dims eyes that can no longer tell bee from dust or stones. So I stand, stretch again, look around. A few ox-eyed daisies glare from deep in white, and over all White Man Mountain grasps at whatever the sun's left, holds, then has to let go. Silent as an owl feather, I walk in the right direction, I think, back to the small house I have just...