Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

by Annie Dillard

this curious rush of small waters.

Tonight I hear outside a sound of going in the tops of the mulberry trees;

Scriptural allusion, when the Lord fought for the Israelites.

and make of gibberish a nimble sense.

the careful emptiness

The mockingbird’s invention is limitless; he strews newness about as casually as

a god.

it might as well keep me awake out of wonder as rage.

There is no way you can tell the

child that if language had been a melody, he had mastered it and done well, but that since it was in fact a sense, he had botched it utterly.

The real and proper question is: Why is it beautiful?

Beauty itself is the language to which we have no key; it is the mute cipher, the cryptogram, the uncracked, unbroken code.

and have your name inscribed Latinly in some secular version of an eternal rollbook,

as if I were to bite down on a granite slab and start to swell, bud, and flower.

A big elm in a single season might make as many as six

million leaves, wholly intricate, without budging an inch; I couldn’t make one.

spreading silence before me in a wave,

I’ve an eyeful of fish-scale and star.

with a spendthrift genius and an extravagance of care.

don’t know what it is about fecundity that so appalls.

Every glistening egg is a memento mori.

the rock barnacle. Inside every one of those millions of hard white cones on the rocks—the kind that bruises your heel as you bruise its head—is

Sea water seems suddenly to be but a broth of barnacle bits.

I examine the trapezoids of skin covering the back of my hands like blown dust motes moistened to clay.

You’d be thin, too.

Can it possibly be that I should move my anchor-hold to the side of a library?

so that an old needle might be little more than a barely enclosed slit.

To say that holiness is a fish is a statement of the abundance of grace;

They are there, they are certainly there, free, food, and wholly fleeting.

I find it hard to see anything about a bird that it does not want seen.

But in my surprise at having the light come on so suddenly, and at having my consciousness returned to me all at once and bearing an inverted muskrat,

They show me by their very wariness what a prize it is simply to open my eyes and behold.

Muskrats are the bread and butter of the carnivorous food chain.

Many animals are the same way: they can’t see a thing unless it’s moving.

And I have often noticed that even a few minutes of this self-forgetfulness is tremendously invigorating. I wonder if we do not waste most of our

energy just by spending every waking minute saying hello to ourselves.

leaving me alone with my dignity for days on end,

a procedure so ridiculous that only a total unself-consciousness will permit me to live with myself.

caught in a stare-down with a grizzly bear, the best thing to do is talk to him softly and pleasantly. Your voice is supposed to have a soothing effect. I have not yet had occasion to test this out on grizzly bears, but I can attest

that it does not work on muskrats. It scares them witless. I have tried time and again.

Swarms of locusts are ordinary grasshoppers gone berserk.

But does the goldfinch eat thorny sorrow with the thistle, or do I?

Cicadas—which Donald E. Carr calls “the guns of August”—were out in full force.

But what can I do with a charmed circle of male bobwhites but weep?

Every minute on a square mile of this land—on the steers and the orchard, on the quarry,

the meadow, and creek—one ten thousandth of an ounce of starlight spatters to earth. What percentage of an ounce did that make on my eyes and cheeks and arms, tapping and nudging as particles, pulsing and stroking as waves?

the lazy sinuosity that can only mean snake.

so unmarked by any passage.

his Britishness fully unfurled, “All cold-blooded animals . . . spend an unexpectedly large proportion of their time doing nothing at all, or at any rate nothing in particular.”

(and fecundity is a defense)

Shall I go northing? My legs are long.