And last
night the sapphire of the raccoon's eyes in the beam of the flashlight.
He was
climbing a tree beside the house, trying to get onto the porch, I think, for a
wad of oatmeal
Simmered in
cider from the bottom of the pan we'd left out for the birds.
And earlier
a burnished, somewhat dazed woodchuck, his coat gleaming with spring,
Loping
toward his burrow in the roots of a tree among the drying winter's litter
Of old
leaves on the floor of the woods, when I went out to get the New York Times.
And male
cardinals whistling back and forth—sireeep, sreeep, sreeep—
Sets of
three sweet full notes, weaving into and out of each other like the triplet
rhymes in medieval poetry,
And the
higher, purer notes of the tufted titmice among them,
High in the
trees where they were catching what they could of the early sun.
And a doe
and two yearlings, picking their way along the worrying path they'd made
through the gully, their coats the color of the forest floor,
Stopped
just at the roots of the great chestnut where the woodchuck's burrow was,
Froze, and
the doe looked back over her shoulder at me for a long moment, and leapt
forward,
Her young
following, and bounded with that almost mincing precision in the landing of
each hoof
Up the
gully, over it, and out of sight. So that I remembered
Dreaming
last night that a deer walked into the house while I was writing at the kitchen
table,
Came in the
glass door from the garden, looked at me with a stilled defiant terror, like a
thing with no choices,
And, neck
bobbing in that fragile-seeming, almost mechanical mix of arrest and liquid
motion, came to the table
And
snatched a slice of apple, and stood, and then quietened, and to my surprise
did not leave again.
And those
little captains, the chickadees, swift to the feeder and swift away.
And the
squirrels with their smoke-plume tails trailing digging in the leaves to bury
or find buried—
I'm told
they don't remember where they put things, that it's an activity of incessant
discovery—
Nuts,
tree-fall proteins, whatever they forage from around the house of our leavings,
And the
flameheaded woodpecker at the suet with his black-and-white ladderback elegant
fierceness—
They take
sunflower seeds and stash them in the rough ridges of the tree's bark
Where the
beaks of the smoke-and-steel blue nuthatches can't quite get at them—
Though the
nuthatches sometimes seem to get them as they con the trees methodically for
spiders' eggs or some other overwintering insect's intricately packaged lump of
futurity
Got from
its body before the cold came on.
And the
little bat in the kitchen lightwell—
When I
climbed on a chair to remove the sheet of wimpled plastic and let it loose,
It flew
straight into my face and I toppled to the floor, chair under me,
And it
flared down the hall and did what seemed a frantic reconnoiter of the windowed,
high-walled living room.
And lit on
a brass firelog where it looked like a brown and ash
grey
teenaged suede glove with Mephistophelean dreams,
And then,
spurt of black sperm, up, out the window, and into the twilight woods.
All this
life going on about my life, or living a life about all this life going on,
Being a
creature, whatever my drama of the moment, at the edge of the raccoon's world—
He froze in
my flashlight beam and looked down, no affect, just looked,
The
ringtail curled and flared to make him look bigger and not to be messed with—
I was
thinking he couldn't know how charming his comic-book robber's mask was to me,
That his
experience of his being and mine of his and his of mine were things entirely
apart,
Though
there were between us, probably, energies of shrewd and respectful tact, based
on curiosity and fear—
I knew
about his talons whatever he knew about me—
And as for
my experience of myself, it comes and goes, I'm not sure it's any one thing, as
my experience of these creatures is not,
And I know
I am often too far from it or too near, glad to be rid of it which is why it
was such a happiness,
The bright
orange of the cat, and the first pool of green grass-leaves in early April, and
the birdsong—that orange and that green not colors you'd set next to one
another in the human scheme.
And the
crows' calls, even before you open your eyes, at sunup.
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