The Genius of the Place

Rebuilding a Woodpile at the Summer Solstice

—in memory of George Garrett

It must be a strain of residual Yankee in me, that advises it’s best to prepare for whatever eventualities we can, though I won’t climb to the flue to plunge and retrieve a wire brush until cold has caught the bees.

Things turned elegaic when I began to play a memory game with the garden, stacking one split of oak for the squash plants laying their tripwires a month from here,

then an elbow of applewood for bean blossoms like the bee-sting lips on old movie vamps, and one log for that insect I spot two or three times a summer, that looks like a sparkplug

with wires twisted on for legs and antennae, its buzz and crackle suggesting technology. So it went, top to bottom, no sign of rodent nests or a coachwhip snake hauling its braid out of sight.

Prying the bottom layer, there was bleached grass and rolypoly bugs, mushroom territory come September. I should have done this on a day when frost is curing the final pole beans to strips of leather.

Lord, if it’s possible for those seeming originals to rise out of punkwood and sawdust for a few days, I mean the mushroom like an orange on a stick and the one like a brass-studded leather biker’s cap,

maybe it’s possible that after my longest flight, in need of fortification, I’ll walk into a paneled lounge as I did once at Logan Airport and your servant George will turn from the bar again

with the sun in his smile and a new story.

The Satirist Audubon

Norway rats in 1812 chewed through a box he’d stored in a friend’s Kentucky barn, and nested therein, two-hundred paintings lost. “It seems, as if as long as I live, I must labor as if at the treadmill,” he said. “I wish I had eight pairs of hands.” His mouse, quaffing deeply from a hen’s egg, gives us the eye of a coquette who is traipsing down Dauphine Street. This Rocky Mountain Neotama and Douglas Squirrel could be swapping tall stories on Jacob Aumack’s flatboat, bound for the Mississippi. Not in his birds; but, in the eyes and teeth of mammals facing us, the question of Audubon as satirist arises. His mink and stoat seem to threaten foreclosure, as though he fed his work his rage, remembering the rats of 1812, the debtors’ prison and bankruptcies. Here is a marmot bland-faced as a riverboat card sharp, and here his grinning woodchuck seems a pilferer sidling along a trace. Easy to see in his skunk the feral innkeeper, his Hare Squirrels exchanging common gossip. We are not spared. This Mole-shaped Pouched Rat looks down his nose at us.

Totems

I live between the heron and the wren . . .

—Theodore Roethke

Maybe I should downsize and opt for the wren at my age, though the heron enlisted me on a May afternoon in 1965. North Pamet Road, delivering shrubbery for a landscaper,

a great blue in that kettle pond by the overgrown cranberry bog, tallest and stillest, the genius of the place. That day I knew distractions would not be fatal to my hopes here.

The wren is disarming though, lifting its throat and letting go at the sky so you have to clutch in surprise whatever you’re holding. I love how at nesting time its warning buzz can make strangers look around for the rattlesnake.

Would it be presumption or even desertion to shift my needs onto it? It must weigh only about as much as the heron’s kneecap, and the great blue is perfect for the flat long trip across distance, the overview, its cronk matter-of-fact.

If I go quietly in winter the heron may hold its ground twenty feet away. Never have I had a bad day with one sailing on the margins—it can mean good mail at the P.O. that afternoon, for instance.

Ah...