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These are the things that the human eye cannot see.
The individual primary feathers of the mallard duck in flight. Either wing individually of the ruby-throated hummingbird in flight. The purple-blue secondary feathers, like dark stained-glass, when the hen mallard, quacking, stretches her wings on the water in the fog before the dawn. The black ruff tufts of the male ruffed grouse perched overhead very close on a branch in the shade of the firs while backlit. A pup working in the tall grass, the Canadian rye and reed canary-grass. A pup in the knee-high corn, veiled like the truth in an exacting poem.
We might wish we could see these things more clear.
These are the things the human ear fails to hear.
The snorting of the bear at the bees’ nest trough. The cracking of a green rib bone of a fawn between canine molars. The exhaling breath of a beaver as it breaks the pond’s surface. A mouse in the insulation. The wood duck ducklings crying alone deep in their hollow. The rate of flow of a meadow creek. One’s foot stepping light on the sod along the stream and the spooking of the trout underneath. The location of dancing gnats and caddisflies and mayflies in the dark. Your voice in your pup’s head as she dreams.
Photo by David Johnson
We can only imagine these things.
These, too, are the things the human tongue will not taste.
A rotten – dried, not bloated – mouse, and the hardened peanut butter on the Victor trap pan, nor the wooden Victor trap itself. The blood from the fawn. The skunk musk so close it’s on your tongue. Pork past-due, and chicken past-due, and hamburger past-due. Leaves of grass. The dead mallard held lightly in your mouth, saturated through to the down now because dead, wet with the swamp water, nor the deathly taste of steel shot and gun powder. Goose droppings on the lake shore with the preened goose downs shaking in the breeze. Matured cattails, though I’ve tasted young, green, steamed cattails served with butter and salt and eaten like corn on the cob. The roots of cattails and nutgrass. The arrowhead tuber – the water potato – plucked from the muck. The popple sucker and popple bark and popple bud.
These things are disgusting and taboo and uncivilized.
These are the things we cannot smell.
Standing in its midst, not the mustard-colored gas from the vent of the skunk, shot in the body, dying slowly. Not the sow bear and her two cubs as they meander down the valley in the evening. Nor in the dark the bear outside in the compost bin, in the birdfeeder, on the berry tree. The markings of a strange dog at the end of the driveway – the corner where the driveway meets the road, nor markings on the truck tires. A gamebird upwind – in the swamp cutgrass in the snow, or in the green alders or on the cold water.
These things are not for us.
These are the things a man no longer feels.
The coldness of November now at the Fourth of July. Peppy’s whiskers; her paws; her breath. Lucy’s tongue on my face. Lacey’s tail thump-thumping against my knee. The cats’ warm purring on my chest. Phuong’s gaze; Nicole’s gentleness. My grandfather’s respect. My grandmother’s un-trusting look. My brother’s love. Any but the most fleeting of fatherly feelings.
But these are the things I do feel.
We walked the dirt road in the late afternoon, a dog and a pup and a man, and the dog ran far ahead epically, and the pup ran ahead and then back to me affectionately, and they ran this way and that across the road and into the tall grasses of so many species and up into the firs so much uniform. And all the while I was writing my poem. So much of me so dull though some part still so vital.
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