Antarctica calves, and calves again,
groaning like all trees that fall unheard.
It tips the worn, abandoned stations’
slush of boards and stuttering instruments
into the rusty southernmost sea of the world.
A few runt penguins poke blind heads
from the bobbing rime of ruddy algae
into the rush of wind through cloven places,
and under a gray-green sky, where upside down
the heat of his successors’ stoves ascended
to the widening smokehole between the air and the stars,
Scott with Bowers and Wilson once more sets sail.
Such unaccustomed warmth is shed
on the cairn’s impacted tooth in the broader snow,
the men in their flattened tent might almost wake.
Voyaging kept them alive once, if only so long.
He doesn’t remember now how he wanted
(beyond prayer how he inadmissibly wanted)
to lead, to find, to be there first,
to name, to be namesake, to be remembered
by many many men who would never go.
Where the compass cast its perfect south shadow,
how much less wondrous the uncivilized expanse
with Norway’s flag already battering the gale.
This time his dwindling vessel neglects discovery—
nudged from below by great reptilian snouts,
littered with small black monarchs blown off course,
stared down by a ship that rattles with broken long-bones
of contest winners, entrepreneurs, and widows,
whose marrow tasted of similar desires.
Past the equator—no one is measuring—Birdie slips away.
The ice floor cannot be trusted. Wilson goes, and the lamp.
Scott wallows on till the last inches fail beneath him:
His thawed lids open; he flies in his furs and leather
home, down the darkening waters to Westminster Abbey.
Home, to find the new creatures couched in its aisles.
In the cold world, some things were simpler,
like dying—everyone knew
you could find a place where snow took shelter
and lie quiet till the wind
brought you your voices.
And fewer of these black flies,
in a shorter season,
hung over us choosing skin to bite,
sipping from the animals’ white eyes.
Now they rise in clouds from what grass there is.
They seek comfort, like anyone else.
The glaciers perish and leave high naked dirt,
abandon their valleys that fill instead
with ghosts we cannot walk on: the sleeping man
with his unstrung yew bow, the herds of small hairy cows,
the meltwater meadows.
Rivers of snow will be fairy tales to our children,
like the spruce and larch forests broad as kingdoms.
We lie in the slag and look high up
to the rubble line trailed by Aletsch’s iron robes.
Three hundred feet above us our milk cows
used to cross on ice to their summer pasture.
Canon Copernicus at Frombork in Warmia
picks his way among the rotting cows slain
by one side or the other. It was a small war
as wars go, or part of one too large to see.
Already time for a clergyman to clean
what’s left as best he can; let a peasant woman
cry on his sleeve, let the merchants be
admonished back to market. He can’t see the birds,
but hears their hundred voices from the trees
budding bare. Beyond them, soon, the stars.
The stars. Too often in these later years
they divide, and slide above his eyes,
but he has them, has their tracks in his books,
has them in their thirty-four beautiful spheres.
Always more work to do, of course.
And more work for Tycho, rubbing his silver nose
and its reflections of the world’s best instruments
for marking skies, wondering why it still itches;
and Kepler, lusting over his ovoid numbers
unconsciously mended by two mistakes opposed;
and all the others, all of them not gone soldiering,
who grind their lenses to hunt for germs, who stain
their fingers among beakers and alembics, who stay up late
with moths, or brave a continent to find a camelopard.
Anything that lets them cover a blank place
with answerable questions: Where to find.
What to feed it. How to measure. What will be radiant
and for how long. They see a sparrow fall
and want to know how many birds per cat, how old it was,
its offspring, habits, parasites, and genes.
The damaged fields fill with dusk, with the liquor
that pools in the back of the brain when you lie down.
Canon Copernicus, nephew of Waczenrode,
will write one book on economy, one on the heavens
(which way the stars go, why the sun is the center),
will do geometry and do good.
No book on war, or why his brother died a leper,
why a turned blind beak lies just by his boot,
with a few wet feathers shaped by the absent breast
like the inner arch of clasped hands beginning to open.
Tree with the half-moon scar, cleft-headed tree,
tree with its arms out, tree with bent back.
Nat Courthope scrapes yellow mud from his boots,
thanking his intermittent God for this rain,
cursing Him (afterthought) for three years
on a Spice Island lump seven hundred miles from Makassar
with nothing but rain to drink. And for Dutch dogs
strutting their ships through the Bandas
to stop his provisions. One hour it takes—
without ducking back of the ramparts—to walk
this piece of dirt good for nothing but nutmeg trees.
Three years. The Company said hold Pulau Run
and gave him two ships. It was something to do.
Sea motion, equatorial skies empty enough
for chasing the circle that flirts with his vision,
ghost-perfect. Something to do for coin
away from London, where a man might be no one
to countless no ones stuffing the streets,
moiling on the bridge over the stinking Thames.
Instead: three years, no money, mosquitoes,
the Swan taken early, damn its contrary captain,
the Defence soon after—Throgmorton’s men shackled
underground, with Dutch dung dropped on their heads.
Instead: watching Pulau Run’s little green nutmeg fruits
swell, split open, and fall. Tree with bent back,
tree with its arms out, cleft-headed tree,
tree with the half-moon scar. An hour around.
“We have rubbed off the skinne alreadie,” he writes,
“and if we rub any longer, we shall rub to the bone.”
The rice is rationed. Two years and more
since Gunung Api, the nearest volcano, retched
and hot-shelled the Dutch forts as he cannot.
(To have now the ordnance shot off when first they landed.)
Waiting for mangoes to ripen, waiting for rain,
waiting for Dutch attack. “I wish it,
being not so much able to stand out as willing
to make them pay deare.” He rows out
with twenty-one men, and a bullet
lets all the waiting out of his chest like a sigh.
He rolls overboard and starts swimming.
He evaded surrender. The corpse was recovered
and buried by Dutchmen, who proved,
when the mails finally came, to have been treaty-bound
to the English that last year and more.
To celebrate, they killed or deported the natives.
Something to do. Bowed tree, split tree,
scarred tree dangled the limelike inedible eggs
in which dark balls of nutmeg hardened
and webs of mace bloomed, acquiring value,
while Gunung Api still hissed and groaned
and boiled amethysts in her throat.
The archaeologist digs shards of sleep from her eyes.
She pulls on shorts still crouching from the day before
and breakfasts with both hands. She dreams at night
of driving a juddering jackhammer down a mile and more,
or biting off hills one by one from a steam shovel’s seat.
By day, of releasing some crucial tooth to the sun,
paintbrushing dust from the mountain range of a jaw
(oh, lucky horseshoe) and touching the place for its tongue.
She strokes the dirt with her palm for anything new to read,
for pieces of eloquent brain case nested like eggshell,
a lonely pelvis with wide expressive sockets.
As her sweat drops on her washrag’s worth of powdered rock
she thinks she could tunnel with stubworn brush down
to magma hell
if it were there, the baked clay and painted stone book
that says, “Here are the stories first told of the stars,
the liturgy of the tall gray circled stones,
the first words spoken, the first graves, the first fire.
This was the need for red and black hands marked
above charcoal beasts in darkness weighted down.
Here are the thoughts of apes that looked at the sky.
This is the face of Adam, who woke at night
and guessed that he was watched, and felt alone.”
goat with no mouth bird without eyes
line, a horse back horse, its head concealed
horse with shoulder muscle of swollen rock.
black pigment, dried spit.
here on the floor a dish to burn animal fat,
a mound of colored earth another
crawl, slither, stagger, wade this bronchial maze
sobbing in its old air your boots too flat
on floors rounded like palms of bare feet
through shapeless passages seven stomachs of rooms
and see by raised flashlight the goat the bird
blown onto the wall from his mouth and his and his
but they were not trying to tell us anything
nor are they now all they knew they knew so well
they lived in the cave of it deeper than we can follow.
listen till your ears break and hear only
the cave’s breath all one intake exhale
or is it the blood in your temples
they never saw their own faces only their hands
the voices in their heads did not speak our tongues
of neurosis and hurry horse voice they could still hear
with the ink expelled from their lips bison, panther
perhaps not yet so faint as to be holy
bear voice bear fat’s guttering light
they never saw the black-limbed animals
cease to move in an unwavering torch
like yours low orange now, a dead sun, gone.
you have been thinking too long. so guess
at their knowledge that the goat the bird
the horses are here in this entire dark.
There were barren wives she made pregnant,
says Just Now, who remembers that year of no rain
and Auntie Martha—not her coming
but her being there,
her hut full of dry hanging bunches,
and No More’s healed foot, the sick baby well,
everyone secretly knowing what else she could do.
Freedom’s childless wife was first,
then Up And Down’s, and Rectify’s,
then Laugh At’s, who had no sons,
and Better’s, who was too old—
down drawing water, all the women laughing and swollen.
Ukai remembers her sister wide-eyed before dawn
saying This is no baby,
this is no baby I carry, promise don’t tell,
I feel chameleon lizard fingers
open and close in there, and its tail unspool.
A few whispers later they knew Tinofa
carried a yam, like all those yams she’d been craving,
Chipo’s belly sheltered a stone
or an empty bowl, and Tsitsi felt under her hands
the movements of a fish. The door
of Auntie Martha’s hut opened on dust
trapped by young spiders.
No one knew how to deliver such things,
Just Now says, and the ninth month passed
but none of them wanted to hurry.
He remembers the great heat day after day
and how quiet smothered all the men’s gossip,
how quietly the women worked harder than ever.
Ukai can still see them, shapes in the fields,
feet planted wide apart next to the short dry corn,
bending up from their hoes
with knuckles pressed to their backs at the waist—
where their waists used to be—
listening out through the lapis sky for thunder.
Slide 1.
Patagonia on the map.
It doesn’t look big enough, does it,
to hide vast Pyrotherium deposits
for years from a man who dreams of them
as magnets dream of iron.
2.
The SS Galileo sets sail
from Brooklyn for the Argentine.
A few minutes later a fog came down
and forced her to anchor a day and a night.
5.
They landed at Port Desire, where
abandoned cherry trees leaned on Spanish ruins.
The cliffs of marbled red porphyry
looked rather like the elderly beef
slaughtered that day on the beach.
12.
Governor Mayer’s estancia.
Even in winter, no fire indoors.
14.
The horses and wagon.
Hatcher and Peterson set forth.
17.
Hatcher’s first two guanacos,
shot for the museum.
18.
The guanacos lacking eyes and tongues,
plucked, while Hatcher fetched his tape line,
by carrion hawks.
Hatcher paces thirty-one steps in the sand,
end to end of a beached, half-buried whale
whose skeleton he longs to bear away.
If only his back were broad as a ship,
and the shipping free.
30.
Cape Fairweather beds.
From the Santa Cruzian epoch:
Boryhyaena, Theosodon,
Diadiaphorus, many others.
36.
Troglodytes hornensis,
the little brown wren.
40.
Hatcher wearing two handkerchiefs under his hat.
Struck by his horse with its broken bit, he left
a trail of blood on the grass from the Rio Chico
halfway to Ooshii Aike.
42.
Greenland. Greenland? That was only
in his delirium.
55.
Lava beds at Palli Aike.
67.
The stranded boat they found by the Santa Cruz River
and mended well enough for one crossing.
Inside were two dozen bottles of Worcestershire sauce.
71.
The badlands of Chalia, near Mount Observation.
72.
Abderites crassiramus,
shining little black teeth in a lovely jaw.
Hatcher climbs a 3,000–foot bluff beside Mayer Basin.
79.
He gazes at a nearly perfect forelimb
in a pink stratum near the summit,
estimates the humerus alone at two hundred pounds,
and wants it, wants it, wants it.
80.
Gazes at it again as he leaves.
81–83.
Mimus patagonicus,
the Patagonian mocking bird.
Zenaida auriculata, a dove.
Asio accipitrinus, the short-eared owl.
95.
Here we see Hatcher walking on a beech forest.
For a mile or more,
its writhing reddish trunks
were too thick to penetrate.
He set his boots on their leafy necks and kept going.
101.
And as they make their way back toward Gallegos,
he looks at that forelimb again.
105.
Blackness. Sorry, is that a slide?
Must be that moonless night the horses bolted.
112.
Rio Chico again, made savory at the ford
with most of their supplies of sugar and salt.
136.
April, east of Lake Gio. Making camp,
Hatcher admits to rheumatism.
A plaster on each knee.
137.
Snow.
Snow.
153.
Hatcher on crutches; midwinter.
159.
Final return to the nearest town on horseback.
Three years in the field, and not a single
Pyrotherium bone.
162.
Old monastery’s museum at Entre Rios.
The attendant urges Hatcher away
from a shelf of fossils toward the carefully labeled jars
that hold the hearts of saints.
Hatcher nods politely, thinking, Repulsive souvenirs.
Unlike the dusty chunks of matrix,
probably Triassic, the hearts
are merely from recent people, like himself,
and not of much interest.
How beautiful the flanks of his beloved,
her long back like a river’s edge,
her rounded limbs, as she bathes her feet in the Nile.
How she raises the crown of her horns, shining
with water that falls to her lips.
The breath of her slanting nostrils was sweet with leaves.
Taller than mastodons’ was her golden shoulder.
Return, great trees of the forest, elder river,
where the desert closes salt hands on the Qarun lake!
Loosed from the high rock’s side,
the horns of his beloved fall from Jebel Qatrani
tonight, and the wind eats her bones.
For so many conscious years, how convenient it was.
A relief to know that with one shut door
he could switch off every mannequin at a nonexistent party.
With what largesse he might bring them back
to chattering ingratitude. Earlier still,
to snuff out stars by thousands with one raised hand
amused him, when some boring bedtime
required him to put away his parents.
But now she has sprung from the program of mild surprises,
demanding his constant attention;
he is dazed with maintaining her, but cannot bear
one handsome elbow’s moment to be lost—
must circle her, reestablishing the lion curve of her back
at the cost of a breast’s eclipse to be speedily remedied,
must affirm her previously unimagined lips, call forth again
the mole behind her knee, his dutiful hands
keeping her three dimensions. He lets her laugh,
tolerates her most fantastic statements;
he knows she has somehow guessed she is not like the stars—
obligingly there whenever he opened his fingers.
Buried in this landscape’s rocky mess,
shank and socket are fitted to dry cement
as long ago they fit their looming flesh.
The bone shapes of violence repressed
melt by Q-Tip flicks to the sunny surface.
We’re ready, we crave terminable moments
of a gagging fear that in the past seemed endless.
Crawling with care that looks like reverence,
we bring back just enough. Of course
her arms are gone, which habit bent,
tipped with arrowheads, over the terrible breast
not yet exposed to age by slipping skin.
We pick her teeth, gloatingly rehearse
how large she was, how she could hurt us, then.
After a while you assent. The bread and water
you the jailer admit through the unlocked bars
don’t force you to taste them and sometimes
you have to swallow anyway. Each interval
is one more lick of whitewash on the wall
or the clock face or the window
or the potted plant in its tedious optimism
dragging out leaf on leaf too slowly to be caught
in the act, but never running down. Spit on it
and it thanks you. Most of the rest
is covered now, the radio’s insect eye,
the impassioned graffiti’s news and equations,
and an uncreased unflowered sheet
draped over the raucous parrots in your head
has startled them to silence—at last convinced
you will not feed them, will not pay attention.
After a while you no longer see the need
to turn the pages, twiddle your foot in the air,
push your chair from the table or stroke
the smooth stone in your pocket, or pick it up
when it falls. You’ll grow used to the hissing audible
once the machinery stops. To the height from which
the galaxy is a film of milk
twirling on a glassful of dishwater.
Suppose they dug him up one day,
his poems long since lost, his letters
scraps of blackened batwing burned and flown
and crumbled with their crabbed ancient characters,
and only found his head, stone bowl
of brains, their curves and crenellations grayer stone
from seepage faithful to the faintest teasing thought.
And the first slice of a reverent diamond saw
exposed the tracings of the veins
of some small leafy kindness—
Praise be the past wrote something we can read, they’d say.
Much later they would find in his skull the fossil herds
of vast misshapen hungers with their stomachs full of ferns,
the angular winged things with claw-hammer heads
and nails for fingers,
the huge two-legged anger’s wide jaws lined with knives,
its crooked, feeble arms.
Delicately they select the wet mangrove tangle,
island where nothing is dry, and the barrier reef
they will study to save. One will dangle
on bubble umbilicus down the shocking blue cliff,
tearing gorgonian fans from the fractal wall:
See how it changes color, see how it closes.
Another bands plastic bags of dye over coral;
X rays later ask how it took its doses.
Another with coral blocks set between his knees
slowly hammers out their secret worms,
another irradiates blue-green and calcareous algaes
and tinily slices the great Greek brown sponge urns,
two more plot the extensive line of holes
for informative cores sucked out by submarine drills,
one anoints clams with relaxing chemicals
so they open, open to his eyes as if they willed.
The transparent amphipod with salt-spoon claws
drifts glistening across the tabled slide.
Gravely the microscope attends its nerves,
its delicate sac of red beneath black eyes.
Now, bent upon the tank where they re-create
all reef conditions, calculable and mutable,
a tender love-light ripples in their faces.
I understand you now. You beautiful.
Spirits of the dead, I have come to your mountain jungle
to sap the walls of your fortresses, open your graves,
and tread on your rubbery bones.
Where vines covered with moss choke moss-covered vines
in a stench of rotten lilacs, I’ll hack a way
to your most hidden lakes. I’ll dredge up
the gold chain seven hundred feet long,
uncover the gold cups and salvers and basins,
gold bowls with wide jade eyes,
gold model potatoes, solid gold corn on the cob.
I come from far away, in machine-made boots,
I watch TV by an air conditioner there.
I’ll cut down your big red flowers,
I’ll drag your thin air through my city-black lungs.
I’ll squeeze your skulls in either hand
and leave you nothing but stories.
All the men in the village chew coca leaves.
Green mouths and brackish eyes.
The grandfather, they say, el abuelo,
strikes gravediggers, strikes any men
who even enter the ancient circular houses.
You find them where they gave up crawling,
their fingers sunk in the dirt,
dead of all the diseases at once
that ever the ancient ones suffered.
The antimonia, they say, that comes
from breathing dust you stir up among those stones.
Then you cough up all the blood in your body.
And what about the relámpago, they say,
when you draw too close to the secret cities
and hear a clap of thunder before
the lightning runs you through.
Old ones! this is your disrespectful grandson,
the one who is soft, the one who forgot your gods,
who pins your black butterflies to cardboard,
come to steal whatever’s left.
Look, I’m stamping in the dirt
that’s filled your roofless walls to the brim.
So poke a hole in me and drain me dry,
rack me on a bed of snakes,
short out my wiring.
I don’t hear anything coming.
You should be afraid, when only a few
green-drooling goatherds remember your powers.
Come and get me, grandfather,
be terrible.
Acknowledge me.
Say I’m here, I’m yours.
No one in this boardinghouse, none in the city,
knows what he knows. They pass the cabbage,
they pass him on the stairs; they don’t ask,
swallowing, if it was two hundred pounds of gold
lost in the cavern waves, or nine tons
as rumored. Sometimes they speak of the weather,
or trains. The simple water
quakes in their glasses as the express goes by.
They don’t know the sight of a fog bank at evening
turning to thousand-foot cliffs that suck at your ship,
the suddenness of a hail of rocks and rigging
storming the deck, or how a vessel groans,
trapped in a slippery sea cave. They don’t know
how easy it can be to let go a mate’s arm.
Or how after three days of rowing it feels to land
on a scrap of beach that clatters end to end
with skeletons of seals, flensed in the years
when there were enough seals to come for.
Fifteen of you, tripping over their ribs,
with nine tins of bully beef, some pork, and five matches.
The General Grant was ten days out of Melbourne
when she slid with every sail set but no saving wind
into the cliffs of the Aucklands,
into the cave at low tide,
and wedged her mainmast in its roof.
The tide turned.
The ship moaned like a whale as she rose
and the mast was forced through her boards.
He startles awake at the sound, again,
but it’s only a freight train breaking in the yards,
or the cattle crammed inside, or two drunkards roaring.
Or the Grafton, Bluejacket, Anjou, or Derry Castle,
wrecking on the same cliffs an ocean away.
Or the boarder who snores on the other side of the wall,
sleepers who snore and cry in their sleep
down both sides of this street, a hundred streets,
a hundred cities. They don’t know
it could be the smoke of locomotives, or animal bones, or
noise,
but it isn’t nine tons of gold, that slowly
gathers in darkness, rising under our floors.
What was she looking for, the woman two days from
the end of a wasting death
who told her nursing daughter, “Shave my legs”?
Or the hospital-ridden one
who, coming out of ether, could only keep saying she couldn’t
be comfortable
without her panties on.
If one of us slips on ice, he or she
checks first for an audience, second for broken bones.
We are the apes
with mirrors inside our heads. We pick our noses,
we fart and enjoy it,
but this is rarely mentioned. We make fun of outdated clothes.
We listen to music.
In a thick place of mountain bamboo the
gorilla mother
croons and cradles her young one in her arm.
With her other large hand
she catches her own dung and eats it.
A hum of insects and green wet rot.
The father beside her sleeps. Is it eight-thirty Monday?
His lower lip hangs on his chest.
Alone at her golden oak table
the young lady licks her finger, dots at the grains
of spilled sugar,
and licks it again.
Close to the Pole, where daytime stretches
like taffy
and icebergs move in vast and moaning herds, a furry man
scrawls a few notes in Norwegian. He cannot carry a tune,
but he can make stew. He has thought of little else but stew
and warming his feet for weeks. Realizing
how dirty his face is, he tells himself:
I am here for no personal good, but to help make maps.
I am civilized. See, the word Forward is drawn on my heart.
And he throws some dried fish to the dogs.
In between the launching of satellites, the sipping of orange
drink,
and the wondering if their toenails were growing faster up
there,
the men in their glorious repeated arc beyond rainbows
tended the garden peas. Round-faced Mendel the monk
could not have bent with more grave tenderness
over his smooth and angular seeds, his long and short stems,
and his beautiful, ever so slightly cooked tables of figures
than these unshaven pilots, left without steering to do,
over their small and tentative passengers.
Plants were company of a sort, something to do besides
exercise,
and they had a secret: Would noble generations yet unborn,
hurtling toward Andromeda, eat fresh peas?
Enclosed in their state-of-the-science greenhouse mist,
some never sprouted at all. Some broke into tendrils
whose spirals wandered in their weakened wits
and then lay down. A few, and who knew why,
opened their dimpled fists into resolute stems,
translucent, with a sheen like babies’ eyelids,
that found their way in weightlessness, or the gravity
exerted by the mass of a spheroid seed.
Nobody heard them say, We came so high
but we don’t see the sun from here, there must be none,
or, There is no up, we can grow any way we please,
or, Which way? Which way? From the food toward the light.
I was packed with resin and laid on my back
with my head to the East,
my elbows closed on their hinges
and the wrists with their few bracelets crossed
to make a loose knot over my syrup-filled chest.
Then I had all time and sand,
while my fingers quietly shrank down dark and tough
like monkey fingers, while,
losing its habits of bread and beer and cursing, my mouth
fell in like torn linen over my finally painless teeth.
But stillness was lacking.
I was lunging like spilled water backwards; headfirst
my body—become my own Sun Boat, Moon Boat,
flying at speed to burst—
daily took aim at the Sun itself, and fell, and missed.
Past time and dryness, past desire for the wooden slaves,
the painted meat and drink,
I was collected, fledged from the shriveling flesh
like its petulant stink,
and rode free of the wheeling at last, like eyes on wings,
to begin by discovering that all endless Egypt
was only one tawny shoulder
of a larger strange beast-god, a soft groaning lapis boulder
always about to wake, restless, turning over.
God must love his million billion beetles,
he gave them so much to do:
bore into coconut palms
or eat apple blossom buds from the inside out,
spin and spin and spin and spin
on dizzy skin of a pond, or dive, or fly,
or jump with a click! from flower to leaf,
or stridulate from caves of decay,
Gyrinidae, Dermestidae,
Silphidae, Elateridae,
or trouble the sacristan with a sound
deep in the wall, or glow in the night,
or cultivate a fungus to feed the children,
or roll and push and pat and prod
a lump of dung fussed into a ball
for burial, or infiltrate a beehive,
or secrete a sweetness for the pleasure of ants
that loyally bear them from place to place,
Paussidae, Dytiscidae,
Carabidae, Geotrupidae,
and so much to eat: slugs and snails,
wool and wood, carrion, pollen,
leather, fur, bacon, cheese,
honey, mushrooms, sagebrush, grain,
Cupesidae, Lucanidae,
Haliplidae, Cicindelidae,
till everything stirs with beetles
or their wormy young.
Leaves shift on the forest floor,
a teaspoonful of desert sand collapses,
fragrant dung mounds crepitate in the sun,
beams of cathedrals whisper.
Eggs wake in warehouses, pyramids,
the lips of puddles, bales of hay,
Scolytidae, Chrysomelidae,
Cleridae, Nitidulidae,
or eyeless animals covered with humus.
They never lack material.
Some of the million billion work at bubbles—
domes and blisters wrought of hardened froth
juggled between the forelegs
and attached to floating grass,
or of paste from powdered wood
in the seventh level of mazes through seasoned timber—
faithfully cupping a little air,
a little of what there was, for latter days.
Five hundred miles upriver from Santorem at Barra,
he left the Amazon for the Rio Negro
and then the Rio Uaupes, where with his dysentery
he fertilized the hideously fertile valley.
He ceased to believe what he hadn’t known he believed,
that every blue butterfly is just like the others,
that no white-crested Brazilian pheasant differs from its brother
as he does from Herbert, dying of fever in Para.
But whatever unborn theory tickled his brain
the jungle droned uninterrupted;
undeniably earth devours the earthly.
Ribbons of ants poured from trees to mince the flesh
of his 160 species of fish,
mold deployed its furry mouths
on the butterflies tucked in his drying box,
maggots hatched hungry from monkeys hung out in the sun.
Kept alive, the monkeys ate the birds.
His own feet rotted around the burrow holes of chigoe fleas;
at night he made blood offerings to vampire bats and mosquitoes.
The boat crew drank his preservative sugarcane brandy.
When a man dies, his stomach acids begin
to digest him. (Herbert, my younger brother.)
One day a black jaguar crossed his path,
gouged him with its eyes, and kept on going.
Shaking his bed with malaria later,
over and over he saw the spots on its gliding pelt,
black on black. He could see them.
The fever ate him, too, for three slow weeks
on the Helen, going home.
But none of his bad dreams told him
he would watch from a leaky lifeboat
as her burning mainmast fell. Then four years’ collecting—
his monkeys, parrots, parakeets, his toucan,
his rare and curious insects, every diary but one—
fed as he watched the never-ending feast.
The world is large and full of ice;
it is hard to amaze. Its attention
may take the form of sea leopards.
That much any penguin knows
that staggers onto Cape Royds in the spring.
They bark, they bow one to another,
she swans forward, he walks on her back,
they get on with it. Later
he assumes his post, an egg between his ankles.
Explorers want to see everything, even
the faces of penguins whose eggs have been stolen
for science. At night they close the tent flaps
to fabricate sundown, hunch together
over penguin fried in butter, and write up their notes.
Mornings they clump over shit-stained rocks,
tuck eggs in their mittens, and shout.
Got one, got one. They shove back their balaclavas;
they feel warm all over.
The penguins scurry for something to mother,
anyone’s egg will do, any egg
no matter how stiff and useless the contents,
even an egg-shaped stone to warm—
and one observer slips to a widow
a red tin that once held cheese.
Finally the wooden ship sails, full of salted penguin,
dozens of notebooks, embryos,
explorers who missed as little as possible. But:
The penguin cherished the red tin on her feet.
She knew what was meant to happen next
and she wanted it, with a pure desire
refined for thirty-five million years
in the dark eye of every progenitive cell.
And it happened. A red tin beak broke through
and a baby flopped into the rock nest, smelling of cheese—
but soon he was covered with guano, so that was all right.
Begging for krill from his aunts’ throats just like the others.
Winter: blue ice, green ice, black sea,
hot breath of yellow-jawed killer whales.
Summer: pink slime on black rock,
skuas that aim for the eye. Krill, krill,
a shivering molt, krill, krill, a mate,
and so on. And though he craved dairy products
he never found any; though he was miraculous
no one came to say so. The world is large,
and without a fuss has absorbed stranger things than this.