#bare-gnawn

[ruknowhere]

a few Robert Wrigley poems

IT WAS LIKE THIS

So abundant around camp, the huckleberries

I spilled in the dust just before breakfast

hardly seemed worth picking up and rinsing,

but I thought I should. But in the time

it took me to fetch from the kitchen box

the colander in which I planned to gather

and wash them clean, a pair of cedar waxwings

lit among them and began to feast, heedless

of the dust, and I made no move to shoo them

but moved off downstream to pick more.

By the time I returned they’d disappeared.

You were beginning to stir in the tent,

and by the time you emerged I had two bowls

of berries on the table, bagels toasted

and eggs scrambled, the coffee perked,

and even, in the vase made from a hollow

bone, plugged at the end with a wine cork,

a spray of vivid Indian Paintbrush awaiting.

We were halfway through when you noticed,

on a bare limb of the pine at the edge of the river,

the waxwings seated side-by-side and watching us,

uttering from time to time their brief

and beautiful song, which the field guide says

is a high-pitched whistle—See! See!—

shortly before you saw in the dust,

just south of where we sat, the mosaic of their tracks

and two last berries they missed or abandoned

when I returned. This is the whole story.

After a Rainstorm

Because I have come to the fence at night, the horses arrive also from their ancient stable. They let me stroke their long faces, and I note in the light of the now-merging moon

how they, a Morgan and a Quarter, have been by shake-guttered raindrops spotted around their rumps and thus made Appaloosas, the ancestral horses of this place.

Maybe because it is night, they are nervous, or maybe because they too sense what they have become, they seem to be waiting for me to say something

to whatever ancient spirits might still abide here, that they might awaken from this strange dream, in which there are fences and stables and a man who doesn't know a single word they understand.

Accounting

Burgdorf Hot Springs, Perseids, August, 1982

There was no moon that night, and the moose might have thought that we, naked and heeled together on our innertubes, were a pair of gigantic lily pads.

Then he came through the left-open gate and clomped along the wooden walkway toward us. His antlers shed shadows halfway across the pool.

When he leaped into the five-foot middle depths, he cast a wave that nearly capsized us but paid us no mind at all, thrashing out

and scampering in the cold toward our towels. Instead, he plunged his head again and again into the hot water and flung from his horns

enormous starlit hafts of droplets shimmering, while we shivered in our towels but could not not watch him there, now at the farthest, deepest end,

the water barely reaching his withers. He blew three blasts of breath from his flues and at last clambered out at the meadow end, stepping over a yard-high fence

as though it were a city curb. He stood in the starlight then, steam rising from him like a cape of diaphanous tulle, before he walked

into the meadow itself, among the grazing elk we’d been listening to for an hour, and we dropped our towels and made our way

back to the innertubes and stayed several hours more, making love once, counting seventy-three meteors, nine bull elk bugles, six cow barks, one moose.

Dust

From that hard-rutted, high-line road, the dust billowed up like spindrift behind us, a cloud the color of my skin, slowly ghosting away. I loved the dry poultice a single summer day could be in the mountains, even these mountains, heavily timbered and ripped again and again for their logs. I loved the dust as fine as flour, settled in wind rows and sometimes— in a low, exposed spot on a south-facing slope— drifted over the road like a waterless pool, a swamp of bones and dead men’s breath, untracked and hot as fresh ash. And it is a fact that we usually exploded into such places like children, laughing, while the dust chased us along the road. But there was one dry wash we stopped for: lake-sized, the pure dun from moth wings troweled smooth as glass. It was a miracle we waded into past our knees, a hot bath of earth you swore we could swim through, so we did, and it poured into us like sun, like music, and we rose on that other shore changed, our clothes, our hair, our hands, our lips altogether earth. That day, we learned again the easy worth of motion, the truck a dead sea away, idling, shimmery with heat, and in every way the antithesis of mountains, their imperceptible dance, their purity of waiting, those certainties we see as chance.

Dark Forest

. . . and then, in dreaming, The clouds methought would open and show riches Ready to drop upon me, that, when I waked, I cried to dream again.         -CALIBAN

I love the way the woods arrange themselves for my convenience: here's the stob

I hang my pants on and here the shrub I nestle my still warm

underwear over, out of each leg hole a leaf like an almond eye, one black

fly strolling the vent like a big city boardwalk. And see how my shirt flung up

is the residue of flame, a long smoke fading in the weeds.

I hear my boots go running, though they will not go far down that ravine:

they miss my socks, one fist-sized stone in the toes and thrown.

I'm ready now, dark forest. Bring on your snakes and bears,

your coyotes singing praises to my pink and nearly hairless flanks.

Bring on the icy night, the cocktail stars, the flamboyant, androgynous sun going down.

Let me soles go bloody through the puncture weeds and shards,

let my legs be slashed by thorns: I will follow my old compass, slouching

toward the north. I will paint myself in the mud wallows of elk and make my skin

a new brown thing. Give my eyes to the ravens, my heart to the ungainly buzzard, its head

gone red over all the earth's unaccountable cadavers, liberator of the dust.

I bequeath my clothes to the unraveling jays and I will, if I should survive the night,

rise reborn, my opposable thumbs surrendered to the palms, to find

in a snowmelt puddle, a draught of the same old wretched light,

seeing as the water stills at last the man I refuse to be.

The Other World

So here is the old buck who all winter long had traveled with the does and yearlings, with the fawns just past their spots, and who had hung back, walking where the others had walked, eating what they had left, and who had struck now and then a pose against the wind, against a twig-snap or the way the light came slinking among the trees.

Here is the mangled ear and the twisted, hindering leg. Here, already bearing him away among the last drifts of snow and the nightly hard freezes, is a line of tiny ants, making its way from the cave of the right eye, over the steep occipital ridge, across the moonscape, shed-horn medallion and through the valley of the ear's cloven shadow to the ground, where among the staves of shed needles and the red earthy wine they carry him bit by gnawn bit into another world.

[invisibleicewands]

“By treason’s tooth bare-gnawn...” - 94 / ∞