The Heronry - Mark Jarman

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flycatcher’s beak is a leggy mouthful of bent pins.

      The poplars go first, brown-bagging their leaves, one by one.

      One false move and the defibrillator kicks like a hoof.

      There are words that stop and start sunlight, moonlight, and starlight,

      verbs like the motion of thought, nouns like dreams and daydreams,

      and the end of the world, and the end of the end, right here.

      I remember the Sierra pond

      where at evening bats went dipping,

      pilgrims with sharp chins dipping

      to holy water, preying

      on mosquitoes as if praying.

      I watched them envying their purpose,

      wanting at twenty some purpose.

      Snap the hatchling as it rises,

      skim the darkness as it rises.

      I wanted that perfected arc,

      hunting life along an arc,

      both creature and creator.

      What is it now about the creature

      appearing at a sudden angle,

      wavering through dusk, angel

      of hunger at the night’s rim,

      like a card flicked at a hat brim?

      Now I read it like an icon

      blinking on a screen and ken

      something there that’s meaningful,

      a little void that’s never full.

      By the scientist’s front door

      an azalea, memento

      of a term in college catching

      field mice under redwoods among

      azaleas, to study traits

      of families, their range among

      azaleas. Now she has one

      flowering yearly by her front door.

      Pressure of the lab, of funding

      overheads and uncommitted

      assistants, yet the azalea

      greets her every day, a memory

      tangled in it like cobweb mist

      of doing a simple task

      repeatedly, under the redwoods

      with the Havahart traps, then in

      the clean lit lab. Simplicity,

      youth, one or two obligations,

      their emblem the azalea.

      And the release, gray and silver

      quickness in the undergrowth,

      to hunting, breeding, hunger—

      the speed of life.

      This ghost filled in with stone for flesh,

      with spine and delicate ribs legible

      and a fragment of the fragile blade chipped off,

      this leaf imprinted on a page of shale,

      all the more tender for its injury,

      for forty million years has held its place.

      Startling in a way to see so far back—

      as if we’d found between leaves of a book

      a picture of ourselves from much younger days

      and remembered nearly everything about it

      except just why we’d put it there.

      How do you turn into a flower of the field,

      the lily clothed to make Solomon rue his glory?

      What leap takes off from here towards evolution,

      pointing the way to the pearly everlasting?

      Eons made the flower and flowers have their agendas,

      whatever the population of the field—

      more than a lifetime to construct that airport.

      While she spoke I saw another encounter.

      And then she said there was the drowning heron

      who called to her from the whitewater

      and another time the owl in daylight

      who flew past her window more than once,

      the bear who loped through her camp

      when her dad died, the cloudless sky

      over her mother’s burial plot

      where two vapor trails suddenly crisscrossed.

      She would not let me go without

      another word, another anecdote.

      Nothing escaped her hunt for meaning, meaning.

      And the kestrel swooped from the treetop,

      struck the moth, and looked me in the eye.

      That sense on a fall night driving home

      that I will see something and must see something,

      climbing the hill toward the reservoir.

      I will see the shadowy buck grazing in a hollow of lawn

      and his antlers emerging like a doused candelabra,

      and stop the car to peer beyond the street lights

      with my headlights off as he watches me and decides

      to dip his face back to the dark grass.

      That sense of readiness prepared

      by so many unexpected things.

      The man lunging onto our car in the Metro,

      the doors hushing shut, the gendarmes slapping their hands

      on the windows as we pulled away.

      He glared at the one couple who dared to look at him

      and excused himself with a barked curse.

      That sense recorded in the lifted arms and curved fingers

      of the Highland dancers to honor the deer’s grace

      as he eludes the hunter.

      That sense derived from my mother

      who saw an angel by her bedside as a child

      and knew the ghosts who attended her

      as she cleaned house were playful but indifferent.

      Seeing her during her difficult recovery

      naked in her diaper and helping her dress

      and washing her hair, that sense that I would find

      the

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