Week 3Summer Week 3
Arise and drink your bliss, for every thing that lives is holy!
—William Blake, Visions of the Daughters of Albion
Sing, O muse, of the lumbering opossum, of the nearsighted, stumbling opossum, whose only defenses are a hiss and a hideous scowl. Let us rejoice in the pink-nosed, pink-fingered opossum, her silvery pouch full of babies no bigger than a honeybee.
May the young opossums thrive to ride upon her back. May they fatten and grow large and stumble off on their own to devour cockroaches and carrion and venomous snakes. May their snuffling root the ticks from our yards and the snails from our flower beds. When they faint in the face of our baying hounds, let us guard them till they wake. Let us cheer when they rise and shake themselves. Let us send them off with our blessings as they blunder back into the night.
Let peals of gratitude ring out, too, for the glossy vulture, soarer of air currents, eater of gore. We gaze in wonder at the vultures’ distant perfection, mistaking them for creatures we thoughtlessly love much more: eagles, hawks, ospreys. Slow in our heavy human bones, we follow them with our eyes, watching as they barely shift the angle of their wings to bank and glide, to circle and circle again.
Oh, vulture, may we remember in your circling the cycle you complete. On the ground, something is suffering. Something is coming near to the end of its time among us, but its life is not ending. Its life can never end. You are turning its body into something beautiful: blood and feathers and hollow bones. Earthbound no longer, the dead are rising again in you, rising and rising, lifted on air.
As the bright clarity of June gives way to hot July, let us consider the whine of the mosquito, the secrecy of the spider, the temper of the wasp—who among us could love you? Who could love even one of you, bearing your poisons and your pain into the thick, close air?
We could. We could love you if we reminded ourselves that no creature is made up only of poison, that no life is only a source of irritation or pain.
Let us love the mosquitoes for feeding the chittering chimney swifts wheeling in the sunset. Let us love the mosquitoes for feeding the tree swallows flying low over the lake at the park. We must love the spider for spinning the silk that holds together the moss of the hummingbird’s nest, the silk that stretches as the baby birds grow. We must love the wasp for eating the caterpillars that eat the tomato plants. We could love you all if only we remembered the tree swallows and the hummingbirds, if only we remembered the taste of homegrown tomatoes still warm from the sun.
On endless summertime evenings, on cool and generous summertime evenings, let us speak kindly of the red bat, the homely little bat with the smushed face and the hairless infants clinging to her fur by teeth and thumbs and feet. In daylight, she dangles one-footed from a tree branch, masquerading as a dead leaf. At nightfall she unfolds her canny wings and skitters to her work in the sky, circling under the streetlights, clearing the air of moths whose larvae eat our trees, sweeping up all the biting, stinging creatures we swat at in the dark.
We behold the rat snake gliding through the nighttime weeds. We behold the sleek skin, cool but not damp, and the clever darting tongue, sniffing out the contours of the world. We watch as she finds the crack under the toolshed door, understanding that she is on her way to finding the baby mice tucked into a nest in the corner of a drawer full of rags.
Pity the young mice, born for just this purpose. Always there are mice—more mice than the world could hold if not for this beautiful, sinewy creature, this silent celebration of muscle and grace, this serpent serving our uses but too often coming to a brutal end at the end of a hoe.
World, world, forgive our ignorance and our foolish fears. Absolve us of our anger and our error. In your boundless gift for renewal, disregard our undeserving. For no reason but the hope that one day we will know the beauty of unloved things, accept our unuttered thanks.