Mary Oliver of the gray stones
facing the busy street
watched two squirrels Tuesday
chase each other tree to tree
and play again Friday
hopping between moving cars.
Sunday she saw a large raccoon
clamber down a broken gutter
one porch from her own
and Tuesday what might have been
a possum but probably just a cat.
At night she hoped for coyote.
Silence was a wild animal
caught between a phrase of wind.
Mary Oliver of the gray stones
facing the busy street
wished for fields of tall grass,
black snake, a glade, a pond,
a swamp of red fox,
a phrase of wind caught
between owl and vole
meeting suddenly in the silence
after a gut shot two blocks over
broke open the coyote howl
late into the dust storm of night.
| Copyright © 2020 by Michael H. Brownstein Michael H. Brownstein’s volumes of poetry, A Slipknot Into Somewhere Else and How Do We Create Love?, were published by Cholla Needles Press in 2018 & 2019, respectively. |
The contrast of a city environment, relatively dangerous for animals (not all those squirrels get across the street) to the relatively safe habitat of field you neatly shatter with a gunshot, for not all those coyotes get across the field unshot.
ReplyDeleteAll of us city folk at one time or another wish we could be in a giant glade listening to only the music of nature. Unfortunately, in both places too often mankind makes its way inside and messes everything up--gut shot = gun shot to the stomach, but the squirrels survive to play another day cause no one in the city really wants to eat squirrel meat and city folks, as a rule, just think a coyote is another breed of dog. Better leave it alone.
ReplyDeleteLucky for Mary Oliver the Poet she got to live around nature most all of her life.
I am grateful to have finally realized the poem said “guT,” not guN shot! I read right “over” that! And it was a shot in the city, not out in the field. Thanks, Michael.
DeleteAlso good point about coyotes’ being an unlikely target of hunters. However, and it’s sickening to think of this, but it’s a reality: just as some drivers will deliberately try to kill a squirrel (or a possum or whatever – though probably not a deer, since a collision with a deer could injure their car), so some hunters will shoot at coyotes or anything else non-human in the field or the woods...for “sport.”
Oh, do I identify with Mary. NOT a city boy, and I am lucky enough to live where nature can still abound. I literally could not survive in a city environment. Thanks for another good read Michael.
ReplyDeleteWhat wonderful, imagistic, poetry! Did I miss the breakthrough? Not that I don't like your more 'realistic' material (the poem about the oil spill is one of the finest of this genre (if you would call it that) I have read.
ReplyDeleteCall me. I want to go over some of those plans we were starting to go over.
Thanks everyone for your most kind words.
ReplyDelete