––for Mary Oliver
Ain’t no foxes here, Mary. Ain’t no grasshoppers resting
in my picnic palm. Ain’t too many creatures worth a poem
like yours, just mewling strays tucked under the dangerous warmth
of a pickup’s hood, just poodles with painted nails clicking
pink across mama’s linoleum floor—so few animals left to this chain-store
sprawl, this clocked-in, bottled, fluorescent-lit existence, even our air
conditioned, vents pointing down with a force fierce enough to keep
a bouquet of daisies in full bloom for months.
No, no march hawks or wild geese neither. Maybe a pet-shop
parakeet with her dried green sprinkle on carpet of no consequential
color, maybe a street robin bopping its dingy breast among the crush
of lip-sticked filters and cans, maybe a sparrow, like the one who kept
pecking my window last spring, fighting who knows what, probably his own
reflection, and because we believe in wives’ tales around here, mama said,
Be careful now, death’s trying to get in your home.
But then again, once, I did see a moth—he was big, big
as a burger, super-sized as a side of fries, so big he covered the yellow letter P
in a homemade sign spray-painted on the asphalt
of the manager’s spot, not No Parking but kept simple: No Park.
I was walking—no, Mary, not through the woods
or along any breezy shore—but across the lot to the discount store.
But the moth, Mary, the moth—half-dead, electric
green—was unlike anything I’d ever seen. A luna, I was later told,
but back then I thought him a myth knocked out of the sky,
a neon messenger sent to tell me that things were once different back
when Noah had plenty to gather before the storm, but now, here it was,
plain as day, spelled out for all who cared to see: No ark,
as in, Ain’t no use, not now, not anymore. As in,
Let it rain and rain and rain. Ain’t nothing left to save.
And because I’m not you—no, Mary, I couldn’t be if I tried—he scared
the shit out of me—fort drowsy eyes eyeing from tattered
wings, feathered antenna testing my hair-sprayed artifice, his limp
thistle legs that stuck to my hands when I carried him to a safer place—
well, not safe, exactly, but at least a place where he would be taken
by beak or tooth and not smashed by tires or stomped by some brat’s shoes.
But what I want to say to you is this: I was frightened, but I once tried
to save a thing about to die, tried to ease what was to come.
And the bag girl, mentally handicapped and happy
just to have her first job, followed me with her rattling train
of carts and her mouth of too-small teeth tendered in
a swollen pit of gums. And when I set the winged thing in the grass
behind the dumpster, the girl, she threw that red mouth of hers
wide, laughing and laughing into that long line of empty
carts. I tell you, she knew. And I never knew empty carts to be so
damn empty. Never knew how much each resembles a cage.
Nickole Brown is the author of Sister and Fanny Says. She lives in Asheville, North Carolina, where she volunteers at two different animal sanctuaries. To Those Who Were Our First Gods, a chapbook of poems about these animals, won the 2018 Rattle Prize, and her essay-in-poems, The Donkey Elegies, was published by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2020.
