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Poems by Ingrid Wendt The Thing to Do Though what I did that day was right, reporting the rattlesnakes coiled tightly together—diamond-backed lovers blind to my step within a breath of leaves crackling under the bush; Though he did what he had to, hacking them dead with his long-handled garden hoe, flinging the still- convulsing whips of their passion into the bed of his pickup—that scene, bright vulture of memory, stays; picks this conscience that won’t come clean: this wasn’t the way the story would go those times I wondered if ever I’d see my own rattlesnake out in the wild, having listened through years of summer hikes, in the likeliest places, without once hearing that glittering warning said to be unmistakable; knowing since childhood, the thing to do is not flicker a muscle, to stare the face of danger down as though it didn’t exist. No rattlesnake ever had eyes for another. And menace never multiplied, one season to next. Blessed Among Birds Blessed among birds, is how my husband likes to put it, and maybe it’s true: that flock of six or eight kinglets too young for their ruby red crowns or even those characteristic white eye rings, flicking through our backyard apple-tree leaves around my head so close I could have reached out and touched each one as it clung upside down to a leaf, picking the undersides clean, or perched on a twig—tip of beak to tip of tail the length of my own little finger—fearlessly sizing up my mountainous form frozen, like lava, mid-motion, but shining (surely the feeling was shining) like gold, the true Midas touch of their chip chip-chipping pitched so high the human ear almost can’t take it in. I know my husband hasn’t Saint Francis in mind, although when he says what he says about blessings, suddenly here I am, as Giotto never painted me, high on the east cathedral wall in Assisi, the upper cathedral, built on top of that other, more somber nave and transepts we studied so long (craning our necks to find Biblical scenes preserved in all their brilliance by almost- darkness) we almost didn’t have time for the brightness above: blue and gold and light streaming through space so unexpected our souls were flying, the birds hovering over the head of Saint Francis, perched on his shoulder, hadn’t a thing over us. No, what he’s remembering, when I mention the kinglets, is how two weeks ago over in Eastern Oregon, walking together near Benson Pond at dusk, I was whacked on the head by a great horned owl. I know this sounds funny, and that was my reaction, too: I laughed although the whole top of my scalp throbbed from the force of the blow. It was hard. It felt like someone had taken a board flat to the top of me, someone had sneaked up from behind in that mystical field of knee-high grass we waded through in half light, finding the path to the cottonwoods faint but true, and all of that empty sky ours. But no one had told us this was a hard hat area, who would have imagined Danger, lured by the hoot, hoot, soft lullaby deep in the trees? Athena, my husband said later, hoping to comfort, Athena has tapped you, marked you with wisdom. But wisdom was not what I felt, hunched into my collar, my eyes following giant wings to their perch in the branches ahead. And blessings were not right then first in my mind (although later I saw again those claws that were blessedly not extended), gaining my balance, discovering just off to our right in the crook of a tree the owlet so fluffy grey and rounded we thought at first it must be a raccoon without a mask. All of us caught off guard. Unmoving, all of us stunned into place. Columbus and Me Coming fresh to this Oregon soil the greatest thing was to hike far from any human demand and to sit looking over land empty of human influence far as the eye could see—Horse Lake catching the first rays of sun brushing between the Three Sisters, ridge after rolling green ridge misted in silence—or to camp at a bend in some river large and level enough for a tent, the simpler, we said, the better, our red nylon parachute roped under some branch overhead and staked, giant columbine, wide to the ground. Twenty-four, and an ocean away from my Illinois home, more than twenty years away from tonight—learning at last the names Kalapuya, Chinook, Takelma, rethinking counties Clackamas, Tillamook, Clatsop, Wallowa—how easy it was to sail, certain as morning, into a landscape no one human could ever have witnessed before. Not this rock, that riffle. Not this bird song leading us on, such bounty falling into our hands. |