Doves & Dogs

 I had a dove and the sweet dove died.... 
– John Keats

I watched prairie dogs every day, rise before the sun, stand with their paws 
pressed together facing the rising sun in total stillness for up to 30 minutes....
– Terry Tempest Williams

doves & dogs
 
                         take position in the hide 
as a shelter stalked in a hedge          at the edge 
of a field               as the wind at my back 
as a tree marks the pause        as a void positions the leap 
         & the sun behind me 

warms me warns me that camouflage abets the only shotgun 
      with the right ammunition 
      & as for the distance & the type of shot & the quist’s 
murmured woo              woo – missing her mate 
at daybreak in this brokeness         this crux of aureate 

lamplight – I wonder what is shock & what awe     what is
    flattery    or is it misfortune     & what 
    foreboding        & who is this hunter 
with the slavering hounds at heel      & explain 
to me this near-existential game         is it simply
    a platform for the unwilling 

sacrificed
     
believing that better lucidity & the republic will one day
    return         tell me now         is it sport 
in the retaliator’s pause     in the flare of a rusted 
rifle – the old fear become new     once again – 
reckoning/ counting up     the ceaseless bang 

& thud 

*
And heavy is the tread
Of the living; but the dead
Returning lightly dance:
– Edward Thomas, from Roads

    in childhood I was cockeyed         I saw the world 
straight     but looked as though I didn’t         later 
I drifted up & down the steps of a coliseum on an island 
of ghosts & tourists         charms 

& spells     though I wasn’t really truly 
    there         I was tramping the solemn forests
    of Meuse-Argonne & wondering at the craters
& the mounds & the trenches patterned with rainwater 
    where one grandfather waded knee-high & another 
drove a supply train along the lines carrying the wounded 
    & the dead         & their replacements 

& afterward the people danced in the streets ‘til they dropped 
    all for the joy of an ending    
    but what scares me 
    is that we don’t see 

how simple it is to forget the unexploded armaments 
    buried in these peaceable forests & meadows

& begin again to detonate in vengeance the old fears 
    become new         yet again 

*    

is it in the lacelike patterning of a maple treed 
allée overarching – limb & bough        twig 
& scion – in the most civilized way 
against the gunmetal coming on of snows         looking up 
    at a sky forespoken 

& in local neighborhoods of bore & skuttle in the sharp 
bark gregariousness of dogs in this open-most 
    of countries – is amphigory    
their testament of sacrifice carried on riptides 
    of sodding words 

auguring

or is it in their millions piled to a pike & men’s little jokey 
faces in a photograph’s / the smirks of the strong 
    at the slaughter of the weak         or instead 

    the work of grassland burrow & churn 
    the rugged laced freshets of supple soil 
(or the shooting     poisoning     bulldozing
    of a quoined prairie keystone) or in the mollisol 
– from the Latin mollis for softness – under 
    these grasslands     these Great Plains

or is it in the aggregate of small losses in their vastnesses
    of underground moil 
alive only         for the commonest survival




In the dug out ancestors’ tongue sometimes I don’t understanda word, but I see trust and disappearing secrets. 
–  Małgorzata Południak

& still the Sisyrinchium 

                    departs but not far 
from wintery char (as relatively near as the dreamy roll of blue
ridges) or more distantly bright in gray-brown prairie 
blush      cousin Iridaceae opens her tri-falled petals for ease 
of access & a single bumbling female rolls in throb on a flowery stigmatic 
surface (wriggling her fat little bum         intent on collecting 
heavenly nectar) vibrating her aviatory muscles     dancing 
for the Greek goddess of prismatic colors as others 
of her kind join in & these bumblers (my bees) jiggle & waggle 
& squirm & pulse from their guts groveling 
for the plenitude of pollen in a reverence of gluttony for the blooming 
in all its voluptuous parts: beard & haft & anther & spathe & I speak 
to my bees as elegiac for their livelihood in the full faith 
that buzzes & whines in a cumulative roar         that shadows 
in indulgence my own heart’s pumping thrum in my ears 
& I make as small as possible my body’s gestures in commiseration 
at our shared helplessness against heredity (I reach down to rub 
my feral cat’s belly     she snatches at my rescuer’s hands 
& draws long thin lines of blood red rosary beads) & I am patient 
for the dawn or dusk for animation as a natural ceiling’s golden 
sufferance     waiting for the reverential moment (when all is umber 
& painted in orangish streaks) for another day or night & still 
the Sisyrinchium (a patch of blue-eyed grass I mowed around 
this morning) lingers as cerulean as above the cloudless skies of late-
May in the foothills of my mountains (once in their adolescence 
the tallest in the world     now in their ancientness 
weathered         eroded         wasted) & I apologize 
for my palate to my Polish great-great grandmother – here imagined 
on her 75th birthday standing beside a willow basket filled 
with Madonna Lilies – I promise you Grandmother I practiced 
I truly did     & my tongue tried & my mouth & teeth were not 
at fault     it was my captive mind unencompassed by your even 
then old-fashioned hornbook: it was that tragedy – the draw 
of alphabets/ numerals/ prayers pronounced in complex consonant 
clusters & chiseled pitches – that leapt the bloodlands across 
in the course of time (then & yet again inflamed) along the Polish 
Corridor from the Baltic to the mangled magnitude 
of these American midlands & grasslands swayed & flattened vowel 
sounds sped the not-trackless the not-unexplored
the not-unsanctified from Minnesota’s countless lakes & beyond 
the younger higher ranges to a colder ocean – come finally back 
to me now to unleash my muted songs of joy & sadness 
& in my septuagenarian turn to sing to the bees & soon to speak 
almost as Queen Jadwiga in secrets of pieties & miracles & stilled 
possibilities (now well past my spring & summer
time) past the marvel of my heirloom Brandywine’s fat flushed rubies 
on circuitous vines woven through by the gold furred shivering insects 
native here & truly social – digging in for a drink from honey
sacs stored in star-bunched blossoms – sustaining their babies 
with the fruits of my queen bee’s caste & crown




a turn or shift 

            in the argument or theme: a volta occurs
between the octave & the sestet     & a corona in a firebox’s 
flames    rises twisted (as a jeweled & embered crown) takes me 
in a fallal of color strewn with ashes         takes me
to that fifty-acre piece in which I have the slightest share 

brightest in the life of the rapids below     I go
past the church of planes & river birch
cowering     or roused in lance-moored defiance 
of everything we’re doing – you & I –  in the here & now 
still I take my time (what you might call a ramble in the economy 

of my body) toward a middle ground between dissidence 
& a glimpse of a future (in a landscape colored 
by a past) & I consider that all things appearing in crystalline
brevity predict an offing     a covering     a hunch     still 
this time of year my squash blossoms don’t fruit & my tomatoes 

never ripen & the most of the harvest is in the sleight of my memory 
of the garden’s possibilities & in the median (as I am)
I shiver in the common place: what’s reasonable? what’s natural?
what’s sane? as in the District (to which I’ve switched 
the scene) people march back from Yom Kippur – the sidewalk 

sparked with rupture of war – I blow out the candles & the smoke 
soot climbs to the kitchen ceiling (wax burned dirty leaves
a stigma) – & as I go further on past the National Cathedral 
as the almighty gives me just enough of a nudge to remind me 
that I stand in the back slapping that big bass viol – keeping 

the rhythm     driving the tune –  there is no absolution     amnesty 
for anyone nor any sort of mutual border     & as I dig my toes in
to the Ardebil carpet with Kars motifs – fresh cleaned 
from auction –  I check out a map for location & lore (old rugs tell
taboo tales) & now it’s on to Memphis or Chicago & a girl 

swishes her skirt & says stay away from here     there’s guys
with guns     & still I go down to the sacred Mall because after all
they’re not in my neighborhood & my nephew who joined
the Guard to go to medical school says he’d do it
again – & I’m reminded before he was born I had a cathedral 

view & I could hear the bells’ peals despite the presidential helicopter’s 
cark overhead – & still today every day the garden needs 
my attention needs the duty of pruning shears – my neighbors 
tell me community weeding day’s cancelled for fear of rain (it only 
pours like this in this city like no other designed 

by L'Enfant on a grid system intersected with grand diagonal 
avenues named for certain of our states) & this city is as tidy
& elegant as expected & our public buildings seem to promise 
unity & freedom     & madrigals were sung & there was 
a violin solo & prayerful offerings barked from the congregation 

yes the animals came for their blessings on a perfect Sunday 
but I wasn’t there I went past the Episcopalians (with admiration 
I’ll admit) I hurried to the hardware to buy ant traps for my kitchen
as I considered nature’s mercy & the long line of insects 
from the windowsill to the countertop (it’s a lot of latitude to go

from a bleached-out field to a red leather throne decked out 
with brass tacks) & I thought to be in entirely green seems 
like divine grace – indeed in Greek translations
of the Hebrew Bible & the earliest followers of this sweetly 
terrifying prophet called it     blessings bestowed     & I think 

we are all shoots off the same root     & such is the silk 
of charismata         all shimmery gloss & sliding prophecy 
healing & speaking with the certainty of hungry tongues & I go 
for the underground ken of stolid sycamore mothers (as a sapling 
for liquid sugars) I go for the salvage     of timbered sanctum 





....that the vitality and authority of nature religions declined precisely to the degree
that cultures were shaped by scientific, empirically derived knowledge. 
– Simon Schama

Common Crows in a Field on New Year’s Day (in which)

i.     gravestones askance in a rampant field 
don't make me think the worst (though that 
would be easy) & don’t trouble me with sad news – as always 
for the dead – though it’s everywhere dark as can 
be where my own oblivion lives in me     & don’t speak 
    to me of grievance – where in certainty all 
    are both victim & perpetrator – encumbered 
or not by remorse or indifference     mercy or distain 
(these things are always so complicated) or devilish rites 
    or intimations (what is considered or isn’t
of our own termination’s warning) of good luck 
or fortune or in the squelching of natural intentions 
in the frantic caws of the gods of uncertainty
in the signaling of common crows 
(once in their millions     now near eradicated 
on this continent) keeping us         on our toes

*

Spotted knapweed produces, on average, about 350 seeds per flowering plant, 
but seed production up to 1000 seeds per plant has been observed. 
– Schirman, R. 198, Journal of Range Management 34:45-47. 

in which in his Garden Book Jefferson alluringly describes 
    the Great Golden Knapweed 
    praising its showy thistle-like flowers 
blooming all the way back to Chiron the centaur  
    wounded by Hercules’ poisoned arrow 
who comes cured by the healing power of Centaurea 
    macrocephala     become infamous in our times 
    for its invasive relentlessness 

& in which Jefferson later writes in letters to his daughter     of the seasonal offset between Philadelphia 
    & his home in Piedmont Virginia     & I recall 
my own years on that same road (more or less)
    navigating from the one place to the other through snowstorms         hail & rain      shivery in the arms of what might come next of the universe’s     readiness to exact a toll
 – all that traveling is a choice that always marks endings 
    or maybe beginnings – which in a mad coincidence of hope & faith somehow downstream 
of my dearest desires (one or the other     often enough     is an accident of decision) in its absences 
gnaws at promise and throws up doubt – everyone with an opinion     each of them with a voice –      showing the backside to unabideable beliefs 

by which I’m prompted to question whether creatures in general 
    possess a moral scope (science says no) & if not
do we as human animals live in an ethical construct 
    a delusion of our own devising (in which Cirsium 
horridulum blooms beside the dry laid stone wall: that prickling 
perse ambush of uncultivated volunteers I pull out 
    with my heaviest leather gloves
    resolute     despite their promise 
    of protection         & prosperity) 

*

ii.     there are certain creatures in my river prepared 
to conceal or divulge (offering no answers they are 
    themselves questions) & I’m not the teacher 
    in this series of digressions 
of wisted codes of birds & beasts & stones 
    (that switch & play their dance     not mine) 
though if I could place my guide to destiny
exquisitely agonizingly close to primus inter 

pares on this first day I consider head-on-head the last 
of the giant flying terror: the Pleistocene’s Titanis 
walleri  that once lived in North America (as incidentally 
    we stumble/ faltering on questions of past 
extinctions) & as close cousins/ remnants of genus 
Corvus – in unrelated obsequies in a planetary funerary 
eulogy     (it may be the less said the better 
    on that subject) that brings me back 
to common passerine birds in the south field 
    on New Year’s  Day/ a murmuration 
    a murder of carrion fowl (clamoring 
    in advisement ) & their wisdom 
with the same brain-weight-to-body ratio     as ours 

* 

    & I’m reminded on an unseasonably chilly winter day 
of the summer reek of onion         the acrid taste 
on my tongue         the purpling of bulbous shoulders 
Allium vineale uprooted     testicle-like/ wild blooming
    in my garden         my prompt 
    in the flowering     my reward backhanded
in the stinking saporific arousal of the glossy 
pearlish orb         & still        cook that I am 

    I take the lesson     covering over (recipe-less) 
other imaginable yet more fragile flavors – thyme 
    & basil     & rosemary –     
    though debunking the myth 
of medieval provender on the hoof: of rot: the putrid 
    stench of meat gone bad 
    but it only brings to mind 

the human capacity for masking – drowning out – all other 
    palates & penchants or as this morning 
moves from dark to daybreak at the base of the bluff 
the James River proves the aristocracy of inundation 
in incessant flooding against ambitions    toward 
    a surging sea & still the commonality 
wants sovereignty and/ or (without admission) 
at least apparently         a higher authority 

iii.     a distaff is a stick or spindle onto which wool 
is wound for spinning     or concerning women: 
dynamic nominalism is when the label contributes 
to the creation of more & more of a thing     or person 
    a kind of looping effect/ affect     & it’s not
as though those three girls were abandoned (this might be 
nothing but an ancient myth        or a fairytale
    or legend) in a distaff tale in which each gets
    bed & board         & in turn contributes 
    to the caretaking of infant half-siblings 
all except the one that got pregnant         the whore
    & the mother slapped        her face

*

    in which     in retrospect I ask 
for the battlefront the aegis of terrible beauty: where
is the whole & all its parts     where the reason & sanctity 
& grace (they gut the hind & everything else
    we eat up entirely in one battle) & what is 

    this new crusade that lives inside 
each combatant’s self         open to interpretation 
& no sooner a color than a breast or manhood 
& who are the warriors they fight     with so much else 
at stake     still I look for reason in this land 
    of civil discontent where war is rife 

where it began post-bellum & doesn’t end – tell me
about torpor/ that slothful magisterial     
    older 
than a great-great grandmother
& how is it that I live in this limbo 
    between apathy         & enmity