noggin knocker / hand blackener / allelopath / feeder of crow / killer of squirrel / chambered of pith / one god of many
when do you turn into bats?
i ask the swallows
as they knit dark treetops
to close the dimming sky
wapato glows in the marsh
beside mallard’s pale breast;
black water shrouds his face
but past the willows he returns
as baby nutria
swallowing flames
from the ends of jewelweed
alien landscapes
you must pay to enter and walk through the whole of a privately owned plant zoo to access the fenced-off sacred tree. the Signature Oak is likely oregon’s oldest white oak tree at roughly 400 years old. impossible to either view or photograph in its entirety, it is far wider than it is tall, with octopus-like limbs that reach down to the soil, travel along the ground away from the trunk, and spring up again several paces later, giving the impression that the solitary tree is ringed by fresh saplings. some branches have broken or split from their own weight but still hang in place, bearing a new skin of mushrooms as they rot where they once grew. a woodpecker enters its nest at the lower tip of one such dangling arm. to walk from one end of the tree to the other takes several minutes of careful maneuvering under, over, and through a tangled maze of branches. for the newt that journeys stealthily through the leaf litter, the trip is much longer. clouds of mistletoe sit high in the canopy, as they seem to on all the mature oaks in the area. there is a separate field across the parking lot filled with oak trees nearly as old as this one, but they are not The Oldest, and their understory has been taken over by an impenetrable mat of blackberry, ivy allowed to climb their wide trunks. this field is fenced off as well: help is prohibited. there will be no more ancient oaks.
we spot the fin whale from a mile down the beach, the white belly an anomaly against the shining plate of wet sand that reflects back the grey-blue winter sky. it is instantly recognizable in the same way as the distant bald eagle who stands in the same vast mirror of low tide, dark shoulders distinctly not-rock, white head distinctly not-foam. this is one of the beaches that people are permitted to drive cars on, and evidently not everyone finds this appalling, because a few trucks pass us and stall near the mass as our slow legs bring us closer.
a few people stand around already, taking irreverent photos. i stop at a small distance from the body, taking it in, understanding myself in the presence of a god and its nonbelievers, a victim and its unwitting killers, myself not excluded. i shut out the loud comments of disgust and allow the spectacle of the young whale who starved to death wash over me, and my disposition palpably shifts something in the air around us. “you know, it’s actually kind of sad,” remarks a woman with a lit cigarette to no one in particular. her friends don’t respond, but their pacing around the body takes on a different tone, something in defiance of, but adjacent to, shame.
the tail fin arcs gracefully in the air, bearing a rectangular void from which blood still gurgles and drips into a shallow pool of red seawater. larger rectangles — that ugly shape characteristic of human work, as sapsuckers bore circles in bark and rivers carve undulations through land— have been cut from back and stomach, hellish caverns ringed with shaggy curtains of flesh, allowing shiny pillows of intestine to spill innocently onto the sand in shades that echo the blush of morning clouds over the sea. more cubes of flesh are strewn on the beach nearby, apparently of no further scientific merit. these remnants hold an attitude of cold contempt that is harder for me to come to terms with than the sneering of onlookers; cruel work done to generate statistics on the self-evident hateful negligence of our species, in an appeal to a machine that runs on the desecration of all matter. as if more data will open its eyes at last, as if it will suffer a change of the heart that it does not have. there is a deflated pink shape at my feet, translucent tissue streaked with purple veins; possibly this is the heart of the whale itself. it has the look of an enormous tongue, emerging from the earth to taste the land that wrought its fate.
i keep my distance as the hungry gulls do, waiting for my turn to contain the scene within the manageable space of a rectangle, to make it a document of the past. two cars depart and i take my chance, stooping to place my bare hand on the whale’s dark face. something unnameable passes through me when my palm rests against the smooth skin, holding me there. i glance up and see a sliver of clouded eye that i had overlooked from a distance, and i gaze back into it, overcome by my own version of something-like-shame. a wet streak spans the short distance from the crease of his eye to his open mouth, lined with orderly shafts of baleen, which people once used to construct corsets and fishing rods, before plastics made this organic material obsolete. it looks as if he has been crying. conscious of the fresh eyes of my own foolish species on me, i step away to give newcomers their turn. i have nothing to offer him, but he is not yet done giving to us.
two special licorice ferns
i watch from the headlands as you drag a long strand of bull kelp across cold sand. wind rips seafoam from the high tideline and dashes it against rocks as you sink your knife into rubbery flesh, chop off the bulb, and raise the salty tube to your lips, but your quickly fashioned instrument is inaudible through the howls of sea and air. you show me the first bird, the monochrome dome of its chest a familiar sight by now, and tell me your kelp horn will summon sixteen more. we force our small bodies down the coastline through the hammering wind, on the alert for sneaker waves, trespassing in this graveyard of the sea—death chasing life chasing death—and as ever, we are granted excessive rewards: thirty-eight lifeless pale blue feet.
a trail of white feathers guides me through the understory, where honeysuckle clothes naked stalks of poison oak and ivy swallows tremulant fingers of licorice fern. a talon leaves marks in reddening down; death leading life, life chasing death. a solitary seagull slips into the veil of nothingness and i am alone, pockets filled with bloodstained bird, nose with the silvery musk of spent mugwort. cliffs on all sides drop into oblivion: past, present, unknowable, irrelevant. fool that i am, i follow the dead, and step into a future i cannot see.
for the privilege of communing with the fleeting fog, you sacrifice decorum — any morning could be one that pulls you half-sleeping from bed into helmet and boots with half-formed words of parting, and deposits you in a field where you’ve stood dozens of times, made unrecognizable by the sound-dampening cloak of water on air. the work of uncountable spiders gleams all around in the dim light as i tow my still-waking body through the colorless world of spent wildflowers, legs growing heavy with collected dew.
all weather is a lesson come back around to remind you of itself, and this morning holds me mutely, slows my steps between the toothed branches of steadily hybridizing hawthorns, where someone has slept and eaten convenience store sandwiches, where frail twigs offer numb insects to the warmth of a future sunbeam, where unremarkable grasses sparkle with a wealth that fine jewels would envy, where reverence dampens my heartbeat to a volume that will not frighten the peppering of small-voiced birds who wisp through the tree above my head. the incongruous laughter from the nearby trail is a reminder of my own forgetfulness of the context of things: the way that fog obscures us along with the rest of the world, whether we believe we have stepped out into it or not; the way that the ordinary adorns the common ground we crush underfoot in constant pursuit of the exceptional; the way we’ll stumble through thin strands of silken connection everywhere we go, until we learn to mind the light in the spaces between things that can only be seen against darkness, or with a small shift in perspective.
holding my short-lived cloud-granted wisdom around me like a shroud in the gloom, i ghost among the herons and kingfishers who open their wings at the scrape of others’ footsteps, i drift up the limb of the willow alongside darkly curling fingers of witches’ broom, body unmirrored in the the shallow marsh, i speak with the boldly curious mink who appears as silently as i to circle my mock-animal form, dive into hollow logs, slip into black water, and leave wet footprints on the fallen trees that slough off their bark as we all will our skin one day. the fog holds for longer than reason could endorse; maybe something about it alters time, just as it constricts our sense of what exists to an intimate world of close proximity. when it does lift, the lessons quickly fade with it, and i am again tangible and busy, full of sound and distractions, unmoored by the wide scope of our ever-expanding field of vision.
