I don’t want to know about Keats
or Audubon,
though now and then a line from Clare sneaks in
and such fauna as I only half-imagine
are ghosts out of Bewick
or Catesby, rising softly through the fog,
the unrehearsed existence
of the backwoods, forms unseen
then glimpsed, before the swim
of vanishing.
It’s something like a prayer, to be forbidden
perfect specimens, the finished articles
of lithogravure, field guides, Latin names
reducing everything
to ruber,
or pubescens.
A few yards further and the fog begins
to brighten, daylight bleeding through the trees
and a flicker of noise, or panic, off to the left,
where something should have been, and almost was.