Predator

986

A narrow Fellow in the Grass
Occasionally rides--
You may have met Him—did you not?
His notice sudden is--

The Grass divides as with a Comb--
A spotted shaft is seen--
And then it closes at your feet
And opens further on--

He likes a Boggy Acre
A Floor too cool for Corn--
Yet when a Boy, and Barefoot--
I more than once at Noon
Have passed, I thought, a Whip lash
Unbraiding in the Sun
When stooping to secure it
It wrinkled, and was gone--

Several of Nature’s People
I know, and they know me--
I feel for them a transport
Of cordiality--

But never met this Fellow,
Attended, or alone
Without a tighter breathing,
And Zero at the Bone--

Emily Dickinson, 1865

One day last fall, as I was hiking in the woods, I heard a rustling in the underbrush, and spotted a strange sight: a chipmunk with a garter snake draped across its back. I stepped forward for a closer look, and the animals became aware of my presence. The chipmunk darted off one way, and the snake slithered off the other. I puzzled and puzzled over this scene as I finished my walk, and when I got home, I read up on chipmunks and garter snakes. According to my guidebooks, garter snakes occasionally eat small mammals and chipmunks eat what the guide book vaguely described as meat. So I am still left wondering. Did I rob the snake or the chipmunk of his lunch? If one wasn't stalking the other, how did they come to be tangled up?

I admit my instinct was that the snake was the aggressor. It is hard to look at a chipmunk and see it as a threat to other living creatures. The bright eye, the bushy tail, the smooth fur--they all seem so cuddly and cute. But the chimpunk also has sharp teeth and claws. If it wanted to, it could do damage proportionate to its size. The snake, on the other hand, has everything going against it. The cold dry scaliness of it, the alien way of moving, the heavy weight of cultural prejudice all combine to elicit that "zero at the bone".

In the end, though, I had to leave the question open. Looks can be deceiving, and just because culture tells us one of them is untrustworthy and dangerous does not mean in this case that the snake was fulfilling its iconic role. Perhaps the softer-seeming chipmunk was the danger to look out for. And that can be true in human pairings, too. We do not always fill the role culture dictates for us. One cannot always be sure who is the predator.

Mental Slideshow

I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed---and gazed---but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

William Wordsworth, 1807

What Wordsworth calls the bliss of solitude, a friend of mine calls her eyelid slideshow. I keep a stock of slides, too, to pull out whenever I need a shot of beauty. An eagle flying overhead, a mist of blue forget-me-nots in a green wood, a road arched over with scarlet maples and yellow birch--they have all brought me comfort and joy in a grey moment. And I have not only an inward eye, but also an inward ear, and I remember snips of poetry or beautiful words or music. The inner world of my mind is ever-present, ever-ready to provide me beauty and joy. If I can remember to call upon it.

Anyway, spring is upon us, and I have been adding to my mental slideshow today with a walk in the maplewood. I took a few pictures to share with you, but one I can't share: a clear, liquid birdsong I did not recognize. I couldn't find him in the tangle of branches, but if I hear the song again I will remember it. It is playing over and over in my inward ear.

Bloodroot

Hepatica

Domestic Beauty

Home Thoughts From Abroad

Oh, to be in England
Now that April's there,
And whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England--now!

And after April, when May follows,
And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows!
Hark, where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge
Leans to the field and scatters on the clover
Blossoms and dewdrops--at the bent spray's edge--
That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,
Lest you should think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture!
And though the fields look rough with hoary dew,
All will be gay when noontide wakes anew
The buttercups, the little children's dower
--Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!

Robert Browning, 1845

Because I am an anglophile, I do long to be in England in the spring, to see each small beauty gently spring forth. England, like Wisconsin, is a land of domestic beauty. Not grand, sweeping landscapes, but gentle vistas. It has a home-like quality that draws me strongly.

I do not discount the dramatic beauty of mountain ranges or the immensity of the ocean, and I love to drink those glories in. But the things which resonate most in my soul are not the grand, the overwhelming, but the tiny shots of beauty: the lone wildflower blooming in the dead leaf-mould of the woodland floor, the musical song of the common house finch on the lilac bush, the liquid babble of a melt water stream. Things that can be missed if one is not paying attention, things that must be discovered, or noticed--those are the beauties that uplift me the most.

I understand the pull of the remote places, too. The thrilling thought that perhaps I am the only one to have ever stood just here, to have ever seen just this, is intoxicating indeed. But the opposite feeling, the knowledge that many others have stood where I am standing and seen what I am seeing is even better. A tree stands on a particularly favorite walk of mine: its trunk was bent by a long-dead Native American in two ninety-degree turns as a sign-post. I stop at that tree every time, and look in the direction it points, off into the maple woods, toward the small pond where the frogs sing in early spring. It so happens that the tree also points in the direction of my home, twenty or so miles beyond. I like to think perhaps it also pointed to the home of the original sign-maker.

Eastertide

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

Lovliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

A. E. Housman, 1896

Here in Wisconsin, thanks to a snow storm on Friday, the cherry trees are hung with literal snow, and blossom season seems far away. It will not be long, however, before this latest batch of snow melts away and runs off into the streams. Then the skunk cabbage will sprout and the pussy willows will bud. Soon after, the marsh marigolds will appear in the spring beds, clumps of yellow in the wet ground. And I will walk in the maple woods, and spy the hepatica, blooming clear blue and purple at the base of the oldest trees. One day I will look up and see the pale yellow-green new leaves of the quaking aspen against a blue sky, and I will spot an oriole or a tanager. Then, suddenly, I will not have to look for these tiny signs of spring. They will be everywhere I look: the waves of delicate spring beauties, and trilliums, and bloodroot, and amenomes, laid out in a white carpet on the forest floor. And the yellows of the forsythia and the bellwort and even the dandelions will reflect the yellow slant of the sun. The purples and blues and pinks of violets and cranesbill and columbine and dame's rocket will show off the new green of the understory, and the woods will be filled with birdsong and the rustling of leaves in the breeze.

I know this will happen because I have seen it happen every year for 37 years. If I am indeed granted three-score year and ten, then I only have 33 more springs to bear witness to this miracle. And that does not seem near enough time to fill myself with that beauty.

Sunshine

214

I taste a liquor never brewed--
From Tankards scooped in Pearl--
Not all the Vats upon the Rhine
Yield such an Alcohol!

Inebriate of Air--am I--
And Debauchee of Dew--
Reeling--thro endless summer days--
From inns of Molten Bue--

When "Landlords" turn the drunken Bee
Out of the Foxglove's door--
When Butterflies--renounce their "drams"--
I shall but drink the more!

Till Seraphs swing their snowy Hats--
And Saints--to windows run--
To see the little Tippler
Leaning against the--Sun--

Emily Dickinson, 1860


Today, it is still cold, it is still winter, but the sun is blazing forth and I am drinking it in. I soon will be getting tipsy upon flowers and birdsong. Spring is near.