Maybe the idea of the world as flat isn’t a tribal memory
or an archetypal memory, but something far older—a
fox memory, a worm memory, a moss memory.
Memory of leaping or crawling or shrugging rootlet by
rootlet forward, across the flatness of everything.
To perceive of the earth as round needed something else
—standing up!—that hadn’t yet happened.
What a wild family! Fox and giraffe and wart hog, of
course. But these also: bodies like tiny strings, bodies like
blades and blossoms! Cord grass, Christmas fern, soldier
moss! And here comes grasshopper, all toes and knees
and eyes, over the little mountains of dust.
When I see the black cricket in the woodpile, in autumn,
I don’t frighten her. And when I see the moss grazing
upon the rock, I touch her tenderly,
sweet cousin.