Vanishing…

Trellie would take off like a shot once we entered the woods, but that afternoon she stopped up ahead on the other side of a fallen log. By the time I reached her, she had a bone in her mouth. A tiny vertebra.

It had been a fawn. There was only a little sinew holding the fragile joints together. The fawn’s bones had been through the winter and were white against the redwood duff and pine needles.

Drop it, I said, and Trellie let the bone go. It landed between the two widest thoracic ribs of the hull of her, I thought, fully realizing why we speak of a ship’s “ribs.” And so the poem began. I listened.

the intact hull of her
beached on duff, prickly
oak and pine needles

There are fragments first. A poem will often begin that way – a word or a phrase overheard in my mind, a kind of Ariadne’s thread leading from the murk of unformed feeling toward a word leading to another word as my mind begins to hunt for what has caught its attention. What is the story these bones tell? The question is really about belonging.

Good dog, I mutter, crouching over the bones. A coyote has left his scat, reddish with madrone berries, around the small pile of pits -- pearling through. I cock my ear to the inner voice.

the dog sniffs a small sharp hoof
ignoring the heap of dung
red with madrone berries,
pale pits pearling through.

As a process of meaning-making, the poem emerges from an interaction between listening and what is heard. Initially there is no meaning to my perceptions, just a slight disorder of bones that arrange themselves like a rush of musical notes forming wordless patterns of repetition and symmetry as I recognize the skeleton of a fawn -- skull, spine, ribcage, the delicate bones of legs (one missing), the knob and crook of knee where the coyote left his scat. Even as I recognize a fawn, my alertness deepens. What am I looking for? There is something larger and intangible contained in these bones.

Perhaps as a seer augers a casting, or a shaman watches the smoke rising from a ritual gift of fat thrown on the fire, I look for what has caught my deeper attention. If I can find it, I will know something otherwise lost to me.

I imagine the fawn crossing the meadow to enter the woods, her spotted body further dappled by the forest light, and she stays with me, though Trellie and I walk deeper into the trees. I turn the bones in my mind, recollecting the details, as Trellie darts in and out of sight. I whistle for her when she disappears, and she bursts back onto the trail, tail wagging, black fur carrying bits of brush.

A few days later I encounter an asymmetrical parallel – a fox dead on the road with a plastic bag somehow caught on its body and swaying in the wind. It’s a moment of shocking contrasts – a beautiful wild animal and a plastic bag, both glimpsed from the window of a car, one among many, speeding toward town.

the fox -- its narrow bloated body
on the road, a plastic bag
snagged on its foot

Road-kill is common, and the grief I feel is familiar, though foxes are seldom hit. The snagged plastic bag is something else. Like jigsaw pieces from separate puzzles, the fox and the plastic bag don’t belong together.
Belonging.
It occurs to me -- the discovery of relationships in the making of a poem is how I find my own belonging.

Trellie is denned up under the dinner table when the evening light angles through the hawthorn branches in a way that reminds me of how a poem pushes into awareness through a dim unknowing. The dead fawn, the road-kill fox and the plastic bag are connected by my vague unease; to plum that uneasiness is to unravel the mystery of what lures me into the poem.

Paul Shepard said the modern mind misunderstands the impact of the absence of wild animals. The plastic bag ballooning from the foot of the fox says something about the quality of our loss. It underscores the sacrilege of the road-kill in a particularly post-modern desecration. Will we wonder at our loneliness? And there it is, the poem has given itself in a final question. I have no answer.

“Vanishing,” first published by Canary, has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize in Poetry and may be found in Insistent Grace.

From Insistent Grace…

VANISHING

The grief and sense of loss we often interpret as a failure in our personality is actually a feeling of emptiness where a beautiful and strange otherness should have been encountered. - Paul Shepard

Heart, lungs and gut gone to the gnaw
of insects, the intact hull of her
beached on duff, prickly
oak and pine needles, coyote scat
in the crook of her knee --

the dog sniffs a small sharp hoof
ignoring the heap of dung
red with madrone berries,
pale pits pearling through.
She noses the foreleg
where scraps of hide cling to bone.

Imagine the first flick of tail,
ripple of skin under summer flies,
and how this fawn died.
The woods are full of stories
in rotting trunks, cool shadows
and bones like these, whitened
by winters she hadn’t seen.

But what of her stays with me?
Days later in my lumpy green chair
by the window, cat curved
around my feet on the ottoman,
the dog denned under the table,
teacup on the sill, and I think

of the fox -- its narrow bloated body
on the road, a plastic bag
snagged on its foot, ballooning
beside blood slicked fur.

Will the silence of their absence rise
above the din of cities? Will their ghosts
stumble through strip malls and suburbs
looking for lost meadows, jostle
at the on-ramps distracting drivers
with a sudden vague unease?

Will our grief surprise us?
Will we wonder at our loneliness?

first published in Canary, Spring 2020
(nominated for a 2020 Pushcart in Poetry)