The Heronry. Mark Jarman
flycatcher’s beak is a leggy mouthful of bent pins.
The poplars go first, brown-bagging their leaves, one by one.
One false move and the defibrillator kicks like a hoof.
There are words that stop and start sunlight, moonlight, and starlight,
verbs like the motion of thought, nouns like dreams and daydreams,
and the end of the world, and the end of the end, right here.
Bat
I remember the Sierra pond
where at evening bats went dipping,
pilgrims with sharp chins dipping
to holy water, preying
on mosquitoes as if praying.
I watched them envying their purpose,
wanting at twenty some purpose.
Snap the hatchling as it rises,
skim the darkness as it rises.
I wanted that perfected arc,
hunting life along an arc,
both creature and creator.
What is it now about the creature
appearing at a sudden angle,
wavering through dusk, angel
of hunger at the night’s rim,
like a card flicked at a hat brim?
Now I read it like an icon
blinking on a screen and ken
something there that’s meaningful,
a little void that’s never full.
Catch and Release
By the scientist’s front door
an azalea, memento
of a term in college catching
field mice under redwoods among
azaleas, to study traits
of families, their range among
azaleas. Now she has one
flowering yearly by her front door.
Pressure of the lab, of funding
overheads and uncommitted
assistants, yet the azalea
greets her every day, a memory
tangled in it like cobweb mist
of doing a simple task
repeatedly, under the redwoods
with the Havahart traps, then in
the clean lit lab. Simplicity,
youth, one or two obligations,
their emblem the azalea.
And the release, gray and silver
quickness in the undergrowth,
to hunting, breeding, hunger—
the speed of life.
Eocene Beech Leaf
This ghost filled in with stone for flesh,
with spine and delicate ribs legible
and a fragment of the fragile blade chipped off,
this leaf imprinted on a page of shale,
all the more tender for its injury,
for forty million years has held its place.
Startling in a way to see so far back—
as if we’d found between leaves of a book
a picture of ourselves from much younger days
and remembered nearly everything about it
except just why we’d put it there.
Then Saw the Problem
How do you turn into a flower of the field,
the lily clothed to make Solomon rue his glory?
What leap takes off from here towards evolution,
pointing the way to the pearly everlasting?
Eons made the flower and flowers have their agendas,
whatever the population of the field—
more than a lifetime to construct that airport.
The Kestrel
While she spoke I saw another encounter.
And then she said there was the drowning heron
who called to her from the whitewater
and another time the owl in daylight
who flew past her window more than once,
the bear who loped through her camp
when her dad died, the cloudless sky
over her mother’s burial plot
where two vapor trails suddenly crisscrossed.
She would not let me go without
another word, another anecdote.
Nothing escaped her hunt for meaning, meaning.
And the kestrel swooped from the treetop,
struck the moth, and looked me in the eye.
Expected
That sense on a fall night driving home
that I will see something and must see something,
climbing the hill toward the reservoir.
I will see the shadowy buck grazing in a hollow of lawn
and his antlers emerging like a doused candelabra,
and stop the car to peer beyond the street lights
with my headlights off as he watches me and decides
to dip his face back to the dark grass.
That sense of readiness prepared
by so many unexpected things.
The man lunging onto our car in the Metro,
the doors hushing shut, the gendarmes slapping their hands
on the windows as we pulled away.
He glared at the one couple who dared to look at him
and excused himself with a barked curse.
That sense recorded in the lifted arms and curved fingers
of the Highland dancers to honor the deer’s grace
as he eludes the hunter.
That sense derived from my mother
who saw an angel by her bedside as a child
and knew the ghosts who attended her
as she cleaned house were playful but indifferent.
Seeing her during her difficult recovery
naked in her diaper and helping her dress
and washing her hair, that sense that I would find
the