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A NAME When Eve walked among the animals and named them— nightingale, red-shouldered hawk, fiddler crab, fallow deer— I wonder if she ever wanted them to speak back, looked into their wide wonderful eyes and whispered, Name me, name me.
I’ve come here from the rocks, the bone-like chert, obsidian, lava rock. I’ve come here from the trees— chestnut, bay laurel, toyon, acacia, redwood, cedar, one thousand oaks that bend with moss and old-man’s beard.
Reader, I want to say: Don’t die. Even when silvery fish after fish comes back belly up, and the country plummets into a crepitating crater of hatred, isn’t there still something singing?
My god, I thought, my whole life I’ve been under her raincoat thinking it was somehow a marvel that I never got wet.
I am a hearth of spiders these days: a nest of trying.
What would happen if we used our bodies to bargain for the safety of others, for earth,
But that day, alone on the riverbank, brass blaring from the Steamboat Natchez, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a girl, maybe half my age, dressed, for no apparent reason, as Wonder Woman. She strutted by in all her strength and glory, invincible, eternal, and when I stood to clap (because who wouldn’t have), she bowed and posed like she knew I needed a myth— a woman, by a river, indestructible.
Ruler of the Underlying, let me speak to both the dead and the living as you do. Speak to the ruined earth, the stalactites, the eastern small-footed bat, to honor this: the length of days. To speak to the core that creates and swallows, to speak not always to what’s shouting, but to what’s underneath asking for nothing. I am at the mouth of the cave. I am willing to crawl.
KILLING METHODS Outside, after grieving for days, I’m thinking of how we make stories, pluck them like beetles out of the air, collect them, pin their glossy backs to the board like the rows of stolen beauties, dead, displayed at Isla Negra, where the waves broke over us and I still loved the country, wanted to suck the bones of the buried. Now, I’m outside a normal house while friends cook and please and pour secrets into each other. A crow pierces the sky, ominous, clanging like an alarm, but there is no ocean here, just tap water rising in the sink, a sadness clean of history only because
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A NEW NATIONAL ANTHEM The truth is, I’ve never cared for the National Anthem. If you think about it, it’s not a good song. Too high for most of us with “the rockets’ red glare” and then there are the bombs. (Always, always there is war and bombs.) Once, I sang it at homecoming and threw even the tenacious high school band off key. But the song didn’t mean anything, just a call to the field, something to get through before the pummeling of youth. And what of the stanzas we never sing, the third that mentions “no refuge could save the hireling and the slave”? Perhaps the truth is every song of
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Will you tell us the stories that make us uncomfortable, but not complicit?
Once, when I was young, we camped out at Russian Gulch and learned the names of all the grasses, the tide pool animals, the creatures of the redwoods, properly identifying seemed more important than science, more like creation. With each new name, the world expanded. I give names to everything now because it makes me feel useful.
He says he hates birds. I laugh and ask him, How can you hate birds? He says he hates them because they’re everywhere, they are all over, everywhere you look, and we look up at the sky together. Turns out he’s right, those damn things are everywhere.
