Plot of Land

Plot of Land

We close the eyes of the dead so they will not see their unseeing.

                                                            Jane Hirshfield

The return of things you'd thought

you'd rooted, now halved open, publicly

read: the veins and rings and ancient

signs of weather.  Maybe today it's acorns.

The way you'd watched the grey

squirrel rumble under the flop

and slop of last autumn's color, gone

now past its trauma into something

undramatic, an ending you want 

to be used to but never manage it, how

it becomes less and less sweet all

season, the way too much

heat for not too much time makes

the green in leaves, (or at the cook

top, the broccoli turn from awake

to anesthetized but you eat it any

-way like all the rest of the pleasure

-less vegetables gurgling their limp re

-sistances in the white and under

-cooked rice.)  Remember, you'd 

watched the bob of the tail curl

to the question and then lay straight

out in the who- spooked -it- get- away? 

Who can say?  But before you turn

to stay in another present 

moment you take the day to watch the blue

-jay hop after the quick sashay

and sway and break its broad

and brainy cranium against the feed

box, laying his inner landscape down 

from his lungs outward.  Or a grey

gull's announcement of MINE! 

would sound a hell-uv-a lot more

like (admit it, you miss it) home.  But you've

been away a long time, longer

than you've lived

here.  Or almost.  After the pan

-demic, what animal will you be?  Jay?

Gray squirrel?  Or that way-ward un

-tamed gull?  And way-ward, what's that

ever mean even.  Random seed?  Broke open

from husk and hull to meat?  Swallowed

a moment before the migration from one

hemisphere to another?  Come solstice, then

come autumn, the vernal turn hurts 

in a way no one can see or even speak of

but only massage, deep, it's so deep

beneath even the beating, and not just

the heart but the whole species: beatbeatbeat

in the homing, in the agreement we make

taking up all their stakes: behold! there is our

we- are- no- less- than- Jehovah.  There is

no staying in one place all safe and made

neat against decay.  Even if what lies

buried is never seen this season, next

there's offspring, there's crow or fox 

or stumble-bum sashays of jays.  Something will,

as if magnetized, pick the same plot

and drop what they've brought, almost

weightless now, on top of what's cached.  

Chance and circumstance.  The days of making

one's self into ammonite, into bone

impressions of the pressure it takes of being

left behind.  Dropped hot before flight.  Opening

and closing is, live limpet, an ending quite like instinct.

And the earth takes over, also quite by instinct.

Pats it, soothes it with dirt.  Cools it all winter.

All is not hopeless it says, and breaks it, like

a memory, and makes it take the light straight on

and into the squinting newskin face and says

but without words see?  Touch me

not, please, touch me not, I have not yet 

(but wait, I soon will) acceded.