V E R S E and I M A G E

Although they may be

the most mothering of all the animals,

the ones with the gentlest

complaint, the ones whose milk

has left on our tongues

the knowledge that life can be simple

and good, still,

in their pendulous,

earth bound, solitary ways, the remind me

of nothing quite so much

as those people we become after

the houselights rise

on a movie that find us wiping back

a tear. And since

sadness, however

privately borne, secreted however far inside,

is a thing that finally

weighs us down, they are also

the ones most likely

in the end to inherit the earth; so wherever

they go, wandering

the mud lanes out

from the dairy, or wading into grasses

at a pond’s edge, they

move the way a slow-forming storm

cloud moves, gathering

within it a heaviness drawn from deep

in the soil,

a heaviness it will

return there. And yet a cow jumped over

the moon, we’re told, and

what in the world has ever been

more filled with light

than a glass of milk placed by the bed

of a child still struggling

from a nightmare?

But whatever it is we say about the cow,

it’s the face we love,

a face that in spite of what we do

with our fences and barbs

and electrically charged cattle prods

shines equally on us

as on the grasses

of the world, and shines in a way that makes

us feel forgiven after all

for forgetting we, too are animals – base-

born, landlocked, spattered

with mud, and filled with an ancient cow-

sorrow and -wonder.

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At three separate stops along the trail this week, I’ve heard them. I wonder, were they already singing here before I knew to recognize their song or call their name? Three sweet slurred prefatory notes released into a tumbling trill – Louisiana Waterthrush. These migratory wood warblers who return from Belize every spring, usually denizens of Smoky ridges beside flash mountain streams, yet here they are nesting along this languid often silt-heavy Elkin Creek. Such a wonder!

No less the Goldfinches by twos and fours now doffing their winter flannel for summer blazers. And Robins in the front yard cocking their heads to watch for a telltale squiggle of worm – this week they are lifting into the song branches to out-compete their neighbor in melody and lilt. But how many years has it been since winter days after rain brought a hundred Robins darkening the neighbor lawn; how long since Goldfinches arrived at the thistle seed by the tens and twenties? How much is Earth losing, and how fast? What is this feeling when something you love disappears so gradually that you fail to notice until it’s too late to grab it back?

We imagine Earth lost all her dinosaurs in a flash when asteroid Chicxulub struck the Yucatan. After the global burning and after the many long winters, however, extinctions continued more gradually. The last large dinosaur species held on for at least ten thousand years [not counting the Theropod dinosaurs, whose direct descendants are currently doffing winter flannel and spearing worms]. How quickly are Earth’s species currently disappearing?  Easy for us, apparently, to ignore what we’re losing. Easy to imagine we can always grab it back.

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Ten kinds of wolf are gone and twelve of rat

and not a single insect species.

Three sorts of skink are history and two

of minnow, two of pupfish, ten of owl.

Seventeen kinds of rail are out of here

and five of finch. It comforts us to think

the dinosaurs bought their farms all at once,

but they died at a rate of one species

per thousand years. Life in a faster lane

erased the speckled dace, the thicktail chub,

two kinds of thrush and six of wren, the heath

hen and Ash Meadows killfish. There are four

kinds of sucker not born any minute

anymore. The Christmas Island musk shrew

is defunct. Some places molt and peel so fast

it’s a wonder they have any name:

the Chatham Island bellbird flew the coop

as did the Chatham Island fernbird, the

Lord How Island Fantail and the Lord Howe

Island blackbird. The Utah Lake sculpin

Arizona jaguar and Puerto

Rican caviomorph, the Vegas Valley

leopard frog and New Caledonian lorikeet?

They’ve hit the road for which there is no name

a mouth surrounds so well as it did theirs.

The sea mink’s crossed the bar and the great auk’s

ground time here was brief. Four forms the macaw

took are canceled checks. Sad Adam fills his lungs

with haunted air, and so does angry Eve:

they meant no name they made up for farewell.

They were just a couple starting out,

a place they could afford, a few laughs,

no champagne but a bottle of rosé.

In fact Adam and Eve are not their names.

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Some things we know we will lose – our first love, our parents, our youth, even our life. Still, it’s hard. Expecting to lose something does not make it easier. But to lose what we always imagined would continue on long beyond ourselves? How much harder it is to lose coast lines, forests, birdsong. Saddest of all not to notice the loss or even admit it is possible. Bigbrain, you are the ultimate propagator, covering the Earth; you are the ultimate consumer, eating the Earth. But you with your massive cranium and metaphorical heart are capable of wonder, Earth-inspired love; you are capable of sorrow. Are you capable of sharing this planet?

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If only daffodils had caught the light,

++++++++that would have been enough,

++++ and if to add variety,

++++++++just crocuses and tulips

++++ splashed their colors in the dawn,

++++++++ that, too, would have sufficed;

++++ and if just sparrows, common sparrows,

not white-throated, dusky-evening, golden-crowned,

++++ had tilted on a limber bough

amid the silver smooth and silver rough

++++ and twined their whistlings in the leaves,

++++++++ that would have been enough.

To add variety, it would have been enough

++++++++if only chickadees,

++++the plain gray junco, and the nuthatch

also frequented the maple tree and played

++++++++ upon a puff of wind,

and, certainly, it would have been sufficient

++++ if, beside the steady maple,

for the sake of contrast in the hazy rain,

++++ a clump of gleaming birches swayed.

It would have been sufficient for variety

++++++++ without the tamaracks,

++++without the pines, without the firs,

without the hemlocks harboring the wind;

++++++++ it would have been enough

to have the chipmunk pausing on his log

++++++++ without the browsing deer

who, one by one by one, their white tails flashing,

++++ leap across the minnow stream.

++++++++ We didn’t need that much

++++ to want to make ourselves at home

++++++++ and building our dwelling here –

just light upon the lake would have sufficed to see,

++++++++ just changing light at evening

on a birch clump or a single maple tree.

++++ For us to make ourselves at home,

++++++++ it would have been enough

if only we had said, “This is enough,”

++++++++ and for variety,

it would have been sufficient if we said

++++++++ “This surely will suffice,”

and when dawn brushed its shadows in the apple tree,

++++++++ if we had only said

how bountiful those shaded circles are,

++++++++ how silently they pull

++++ themselves together toward the stem,

that bounty would have seemed more bountiful.

++++ And even now, if I should say,

“How bountiful,” then just one daffodil,

++++ a single daffodil unfolding

++++++++ in a yellow vase

upon a maple table in the breeding sun,

++++++++ would be enough

++++ and seem abundant far beyond

what was sufficient to desire, except

++++ for one brown, ordinary sparrow

++++++++ on my windowsill,

which I cannot resist including in this light,

++++ and maybe one wide row of cedars,

winding up the valley to the misted hill.

[Dayenu is a song traditionally sung during the telling of the story of Exodus at the Passover seder. The song’s stanzas list a series of kindnesses God performed for the Jewish people during and after the Exodus and concludes each with the word dayenu — “it would have been enough.”]

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These poems by Sherod Santos, William Matthews, and Robert Pack are collected in Poems for a Small Planet: Contemporary American Nature Poetry, Middlebury College Press, University Press of New England; A Breadloaf Anthology © 1993.

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Between 1978 and 1980, geophysicists Glen Penfield and Antonio Camargo (working for Mexican petroleum company Pemex) collected data from the Yucatan Peninsula suggesting a huge asteroid impact crater. When they presented their findings at the Society of Exploration Geophysicists conference of 1981, most of the world’s experts on impact craters, the Cretaceous-Paleogene iridium layer, and dinosaur mass extinction were attending a different conference in Snowbird, Utah. For years Penfield’s conclusions were overlooked, ignored, or frankly dismissed and scoffed at. When he later chose to label the 66 million year old crater for the small nearby village of Chicxulub Pueblo, Penfield was heard to say that part of his motivation for choosing the name was “to give the academics and NASA naysayers a challenging time pronouncing it.”

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