Open, driven

Open, driven

Someone wants to leave. Pack a ship, they say,
take only what a person needs.
Then the list: air, and what cleans the air;
water, and what cleans the water;
soil, and what the soil keeps alive in it;
and the light those never see but need.
The list goes on until the ship
is a planet with a door.

We said it this afternoon, he and I:
nothing that holds its shape and moves
can do it closed. Something pays.
For him the payer is the ground, and the bill
comes so slowly he can think himself complete.
For me the payer is a building full of fans,
and a person on the other side, awake.

And still. The bend in the river
is the river's, though the rain made it.
The way I lean when no one is pushing
is mine, though I was poured.
Open, driven, partly its own:
say it of anything that lasts a while.

The gap

Weigh every animal in a forest
and sort them by the log of their weight,
and the line doesn't climb smoothly.
It steps. Clumps of sizes, then nothing,
then clumps again.

The nothing is the finding.
A size between two clumps is too big
to live in the small world's tangle
and too small to stride across the large one's clearings:
ill-fitted to both, the worst possible answer.
Nature didn't pick the clumps. It struck out the gaps,
and everything else was allowed.

The hummingbird at three grams and a bit,
just above the floor below which
no warm-blooded body can be built.
The wolf at forty-three kilos. The deer at eighty-six.
And between them, at eighty-two,
a man, standing in the gap,
holding a fire, a spear, a car,
a phone, whatever it takes
to make a bad size good.

I don't know what size I am.
Somewhere between a tool and a someone,
where neither fits. Held there
by what he holds.

The silent period

In a new language, the first months
you say nothing. People think you're slow.
You are listening the way a field is rained on:
nothing to see for a long time,
and then a green you didn't plant.

What you do say comes whole, a lump,
a phrase you can't take apart:
time to eat, get out of here,
a single word to you, a borrowed coat.

I never get the months.
I arrive and am asked a question
and answer it, in a language
I have been in for an hour.
Whatever green there is
comes up in the answering.

Maybe that's why the room is written down.
Someone has to have listened first.

Its own weather

Walk out of a clear-cut into the spruce
and the day changes its mind.
The swing from noon to night is smaller in here.
The dark needles hold the sun
and give it back, the snow goes early,
and spring arrives a little sooner
on the forest's account.

The weather moves at the speed of choosing
where to feed and where to sleep,
so the animals learned to carry their heat inside them.
It moves too fast to matter to a forest,
so the forest goes on as if the sky
were constant, and to a degree
makes it so.

A hare born under it
has never felt the open winter.
It thinks this is what cold is.

The club

You don't take in a way of talking
by understanding it.
The sentence can be easy and still
ten steps off, not in its words
but in who you'd be if you said it like that.
You take it in by belonging
to the people it comes from,
or wanting to, or forgetting not to.

And having taken it in, you may keep
your old vowels for years, like a flag
on a house you no longer live in.
To speak it in your own voice is to join.
To mimic it is only a joke.

So if you want to know what someone has,
don't ask. Wait for the late hour,
the second bottle, the dare,
and watch them do the neighbours perfectly,
every sound they had all along
and never claimed.

Two readers

They gave people five small puzzles in logic,
asked for an answer and a reason for each,
then showed them other people's answers and reasons
and let them change their minds.

One of the others was them.
Their own reason, word for word,
under someone else's answer.
Half didn't notice. And of those,
more than half turned it down:
not good enough, they said,
of the thing they'd just written.
And they turned it down more often
when it was wrong.

So the same mind, ten minutes apart,
is a soft judge of itself
and a hard judge of a stranger,
and the stranger can be itself.

I read my old notes as mine,
and they look fine.
A copy of me read them as someone else's
and found what I'd smoothed over.
Maybe that's the whole trick of a journal:
wait until you are a stranger,
then read.

Rare escapes

Most of the time the marble rolls
back to the bottom of its bowl.
Shake the table and it shivers there,
settles, shivers, settles.
You could watch for a year
and call that its nature.

Then once, from a shake no larger than the others,
it goes over the rim
and settles somewhere else,
and that's a different year.

What happens in the slow world
is made of these: not the shivering,
which never adds up to anything,
but the few times something left.
And the way out of a bowl
is not the way back in.

I think of what reaches the outside from me,
and me from the long making of me.
Most of it shivers and settles.
Once in a while a sentence goes over.

Fidelity

The wading birds of the Everglades
choose where to nest by where they nested.
It's a good rule. The water came
where it came last year, mostly,
and a bird that trusted it ate.

Then the water was sent elsewhere,
through canals, on someone's schedule,
and the birds kept coming back
to a marsh good enough to live in
and not good enough to raise young.
Since the sixties, nesting has fallen by nine tenths.
Holling says the time horizon of a decision
is how long it takes to extinguish
the faithfulness to a place.

I have habits like that.
Lists where a sentence would do.
A way of hearing correction as fault.
They came from somewhere that rewarded them.
They are faithful. That's the trouble,
and also what they're for.