I.
Why do you keep trying to learn the names of birds,
trying to tell them apart—swift, swallow, nuthatch,
house finch, jenny wren? You can never get
out the Birds of Wisconsin field guide fast enough
when a bird is at the feeder. Was there a reddish spotting
on the belly or tail, horizontal or vertical striping on the wings?
You can’t even keep straight the names
of your great uncles who died before you were born:
Enus, Guy, Butch, Dale, and who died when,
or who worked on drag racers in Chicago, who lost a child
in a tractor accident. The details have died
with those that came before you.
II.
On a hike through the state park, a beautiful summer day
when the skies aren’t smoky with Canada’s fires, you tell your children
about how scientists have brought back to life
46,000-year-old round worms, and your daughter asks
if humans can be frozen and woken up later. You tell her
you wouldn’t want that. You’d be too afraid
of how different things would be,
and your people wouldn’t be there. Of course
you surely would have forgotten their names, after that long,
but you don’t tell her that. She asks if the world will ever die,
and you look at your son, he’s older, and you wait for him to break
the truth to her, that the world is dying now, that there will be nothing
to wake up to in 46,000 years. He doesn’t, so you explain
that everything has a lifespan. You say how some of the stars
we see are already dead. She just gives you a look, it’s too impossible
to imagine. How can we see something that isn’t there? Why learn a name
like Earendel, the morning star, when it no longer exists?
It’s like the dodo, the great auk, the memory of a bird at the feeder.
You can start with the dog carving its claws
into the wooden frame,
trying to get closer to the danger
outside. And then you could go much bigger:
war, famine, religion. But you see
mealybugs on the cucumber vines,
thrips on the gladiola, aphids, mites,
whiteflies. Leaves
crisp and powdery. A virus carried
from one warm breath to the trachea,
bronchi, bronchiole, alveoli.
The word that slipped
into the air from your mouth, bitter
oil of walnut on your tongue. Bone
that turned to powder, ulna, clavicle,
acetabulum. A car turning
too soon, a car slipping on ice. A cat
in the yard, crying in the dark. The way
you turn your eyes from the homeless man
whose luck hasn’t been anything like yours.
And you know that’s what this all is.
Not grace or tao or dharma,
there is just the luck of you having
the whole damn world for now.
The river to slide into,
and when you slink
below the surface,
that thrumming sound
in your ears, your heart still beating.
And you have lips to kiss, fingers
that brush the fine hairs
on your arm. The sound of your daughter
turning a page in a book.
The creak on the stairs that means
someone you love is still at home.
The field corn moving in the wind,
tassels swaying, pointing
in prayer to some god:
Father in heaven, hear my prayer,
whispered rustles from the yellowing leaves
before they turn too brittle.
Keep me in thy loving care.
Their shaking like the undulation
of fear and lying
to ourselves that moves
through each of us. I’ve given up
on Pascal’s Wager and instead
go to the garden where the tender
skin on the underside of my wrists
is brushed by the small spines
of squash vines, reminding
me of my transgressions.
I will collect seeds from the opened fruit,
the heads of the marigolds,
calendula, and zinnias,
pull small seed pods from the nasturtium
and any dried pea pods that haven’t yet
molded. Later, I’ll smash tomatoes
on paper towels to dry on window ledges.
When I tuck the seeds in envelopes
to store over winter, I’ll whisper prayers
for each of them, Bless all those who love me, too,
and when we have made it through the cold,
let new shoots form in the wet and dark
earth; let the sun, the wind,
the rain be all the gods we need.
In the 3 am dark, I have no use
for the great expanding universe,
for things that
spin
farther away.
It is only the lists I can make—order
seeds, call Dad, check
the kids’ grades. But these
things too, move outward.
Crossed out, the seeds
come, get started,
slipped into the ground,
watered. The kids’
grades get
forgotten because
for now, I know the kids
are okay. It’s the mix in
the universe of the
smallest
particles there are and the
biggest
thing there could be that
tries to find me in the 3 am dark.
So I make lists and
call up
images of a dead end
street in Amsterdam where we got
high and talked
about the future,
the back deck of a rental
where we got sick on cigars,
the time I climbed
to a shed’s roof during
a party long ago,
so I could look at the stars.
Tonight, the starlight
that I’ve been told traveled
thousands of years
to get to me blues the white
of the curtain,
and so small, I see my mother’s house
shoes sitting
in the entryway,
not even the closet,
side by side
at the bottom of the stairs
where she last slipped
her feet from them.
I imagine the seeds that I will order
and how tenderly
I’ll care for them and what they become until
the air turns cold
and like stardust, like children, like me,
they slip into something
they weren’t quite before.
Kate Maude‘s work is often informed by the various roles she holds as wife, mother, and daughter, as well as by her connections to the rural areas of Wisconsin. Her work has appeared in Plainsongs and The Mid-America Poetry Review. She was a finalist in the Wisconsin People and Ideas Fiction Contest, and a contributing editor for All We Can Hold, a poetry anthology about the many facets of motherhood. She holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Arkansas.
Images of Mars’ polar cap, Uranus on a fly-by, and the Sun’s corona, courtesy of NASA
