Natural History
The Rufous hummingbird builds her nest
of moss and spider webs and lichen.
I held one once—smaller than my palm,
but sturdy. I would have told Mrs. Jeffers,
from Court Street, if in those days of constant flights
between California and Virginia I’d wandered
into that Oakland museum. Any chance
I could, I’d leave my rented house in Lynchburg.
I hated the feeling of stuckness that old city’s humidity
implied. You need to stop running away so much,
Mrs. Jeffers would say when my visits were over
and I leaned down to hug her. Why her words
come to me, the woman dead for the better part
of this new century, while I think of that
nest of web and lichen, I cannot rightly say.
She had once known my mother’s parents.
The whole lot of them, even then, in their twenties,
must already have been as old as God. They were
black—the kind name for them in those days
would have been Negroes—and the daily elections
called for between their safety and their sanity
must have torn even the strongest of them down.
Mr. Jeffers had been a laborer. The sort, I regret,
I don’t remember. He sat on their front porch
all day, near his oxygen tank, waving occasionally
to passing Buicks and Fords, praising the black
walnut that shaded their yard. She would leave
the porch sometimes to prepare their meals.
I still have her yeast roll recipe. The best
I’ve ever tried. Mostly, though, the same Virginian
breeze that encouraged Thomas Jefferson’s
tomatoes passed warmly through their porch eaves
while we listened to the swing chains, and no one
talked or moved too much at all. Little had changed
in that house since 1952. I guess it’s no surprise
they’d come to mind when I think of that cup
of spider webs and moss, made softer by the feathers
of some long-gone bird. She used to say, I like it
right here where I am. In my little house. Here,
with him. I thought her small-minded. In the winter,
I didn’t visit very often. Their house was closed up
and overheated. Everything smelled of chemical
mothballs. She had plastic wrappers on the sofas
and chairs. Everyone must have once
held someone as old and small and precious as this.
Before the fetus proves viable, a stroll creekside in the High Sierra
It seems every one is silvered, dead,
until we learn to see the living—
beaked males and females clutching
their hundred thousand roe—
working muscle, fin, and scale
against the great laws of the universe—
current, gravity, obsolescence, and the bears
preparing for their torpor, clawing
the water for weeks, this rich feed
better than any garbage bin—and these still
living red ones, who made it past all that,
nuzzling toward a break in the current,
everything about them moving, moving
yet hardly moving forward at all.
“still in a state of uncreation”
Little eradicator. Little leaser.
Little loam collector, connoisseur
of each vestigial part. Little bundle
of nerve. Waste leaker. Pump.
Little lead-in, lean-to, least known,
lucky landing. Bean, being, borne
by me. Little consequence.
Little ruckus causer. Unborn.
Little insatiable. Little irrevocable.
Little given. Little feared.
Little living. Little seen. Little
dangler. Little delight. Little
growing. Little life. Little you.
Ars Poetica: Mercator Projection
Windhoek to Walvis Bay
Pulp the plant and plant it new, that’s what termites do. We learned that from books one devoured while the other was driving. From the conferences convened inside the car. We’d come down from the highlands. Come out of acacia trees and into acacia bushes. We taught ourselves to gauge the age of a termite mound by the age of the acacia beside it. We founded a college, which grew into a university, for we had space and time. I watched one colonial town fade from the rearview and then nothing until another white-washed town wavered in our windows, its petrol station in view a long while. I grew restless with little to do but stitch and re-stich my notions. We had assumed we would hop in the car and arrive there shortly. We hadn’t adjusted our perspective yet. We wouldn’t adjust our perspective for hundreds of years. I spied with my little eyes: several journeys of giraffe, a congress of baboons, a pride of ostrich (baby ostrich, mama ostrich, ostrich—gray and white and black of feather, gray and white and black of feather, gray and white and black of feather—of an uncertain age), kudu—brown and beige of pelt and antler, brown and beige of pelt and antler—and signs warning kudu jump into the road. Nearly indistinguishable from the bush, all this life lived on before us. We sighted oryx with black noses to draw heat off their brains, an implausibility of wildebeest, a band of mongoose, and several confusions of guinea fowl fowling the road. At first, we felt as close to God as Adam, and as headlong, naming every beast and bird and bush with plastic specificity. I didn’t know an eland from a hartebeest, but the naming made them. We felt satisfied until we noticed how far we were past our star’s highest hour. We had descended from bushes to succulents. Driven from succulents to little but lichen scattered close to the stony ground. This reminds me of Lubbock, of the scratchy plains outside of Lubbock, one of us noted,