1
Our wolfish dog, his howling wilderness
traded in for the caveman’s whiff
of cooked meat, his ancestry buried
beyond the muzzling fence.
He’s gotten lost out there, unleashed,
unfed, a missing person,
collared and labeled:
“If found please contact…”
But his inborn sky-flung wail
was a treasured song of origins.
2
Mockingbird: the serenading figurehead
at our property line.
Are you part – parrot,
chirping for others, a talented mimic –
what’s wrong with that?
One throat’s box of voices
speaks for the species, its linguist,
archivist, memory-banker.
keeper of tongues
should you become all that’s left.
There came a crew to butcher your tree,
gloved hands on handles and switches,
twenty-five rings sawed through
with a shrieking whine, mulched and spat.
So adopt your tree’s replacement,
a leaf-green network of rebar rods,
equivalent armature of branches
sprouting atop a concrete trunk,
no stiffer than your long, determined
blade of a tail.
Best to have undying goals.
The world turns upside-down,
inside out, goes wrack and ruin –
your choir sings on.
3
Canada Geese own the median
between lanes of Memorial Drive.
Attuned to car horns, ignoring
the semi-annual sky-high honking
of arrowed formations.
Why all that back-and-forthing
with worms to-go, a la carte
just under the mown grass?
One member holds up a periscope head
for danger signs – or is it for handouts?
If the other side looks greener,
traffic stops as though for a school group.
Drivers smile – they’re in the Boston classic:
Make Way For Ducklings.
4
How to classify pigeons? –
these citified hangers-on, marginal
ad hoc dependents that are not pets,
untouchable moochers, panhandling street bums
sidling up wall-eyed, bobble-headed,
keeping one step away from getting stepped-on;
their very presence a placard:
“Anything you want to give me”.
They used to spend nights
under the eaves of a loading dock roof,
were slow to adjust when dock, roof,
and warehouse were smashed to rubble.
For a week they kept flying into its absence,
then making a sharp U-turn.
A moose clipclopping a street
that used to be its hoofpath
in Portland, Maine
is not a lost, dimwitted lummox –
merely a creature of habit,
slow learner, like me.
My thoughts about pigeons
took a sharp U-turn toward empathy.
5
Seagulls – how smart are they, grouped around
a pile of Dunkin’ Donut discards
in a park, staring into space and waiting
for what? Instincts asleep until one
dips in, then all pile on, pushing, shoving,
stuffing themselves as though starved.
But sensing flung-down bread crumbs
a block away, not missing
a potluck chance – bramble-scythe wings
sweeping off pigeons and sparrows.
Or descending only to find that blob
on asphalt not meat but wood chip.
Some live and die on this water planet
never seeing the sea. A lake in Maine,
Salt Lake City, Detroit, Duluth,
Cleveland can feel like home.
6
They rode horseback in a circle of grief,
recalling the life of their dead leader.
That’s the Beowulf I recalled, seeing crows
circling a sprawled-out lifeless wing-mate
in a parking lot’s empty corner,
all dressed, of course, in mourner’s black.
“Almost human”, I inanely said to myself,
watching a video of geese guarding
a turtle crossing a road. And then
a gorilla’s “almost-human hand”
putting morsels in a turtle’s mouth.
Which I suppose it was doing in paleo times.
Animals shrank as we increased.
We never saw wolves as large as lions,
paws the size of terriers’ heads; box turtles
big as entire dogs; wolf-sized beavers.
Lucky for us that dinosaurs
shrank down to lizards.
Will they all regain their natural sizes
when we are gone?
7
Squirrels would climb Yosemite’s face,
the Washington Monument,
Empire State Building,
if they grew bark, bore acorns.
If tree trunks were steel
their paws would be magnets.
Steeplejacks; broad-jumpers
tree to tree; high-wire artists;
powerlines their elevated highways;
a split-second grip and jump:
hop, hop, hop – freeze –
hop, hop, hop – freeze:
like bouncing balls, flag-waving tails
as long as their bodies,
and brought parallel to their bodies
to snuggle with in sleep.
Camouflaged ground-huggers, as though
A clump of leaf-litter became animate.
Stand-up feeders like penguins,
fingered paws/claws evolved
beyond our hands and feet.
Thinking ahead,
squirreling away assorted nuts
in the bowls of tree forks.
Snow comes, the diet expands
to juicy staves of pine cones.
Multi-purpose feet become snowshoes
when no one else travels the solid white.
8
Head up, red chest out (earth red
in painter’s pigments), the robin
hopping ahead of us through the park
is not running away but leading the way
as we see it, our guide-bird
with periscope outlook, at home here,
knowing this wormy ground far better than us
or any other transient biped.
We try to form bonds across species
by naming children after you winged ones.
I’ve known a human Robin, a Jay,
a Phoebe, a Martin or two,
but never one of our kind
named Waxwing, Grackle, or Shrike.
Thanks for being our leader.
And bring your mate next time we meet;
a couple of couples, a pair of pairs
covering ground on feet and claws.
9
Goya, I recall your huddled figures
like lines of dry river stones
tumbling the horizon in flat avalanche,
stampeding a wasteland. Here they are again
on film from Israel, a crowd in panic
herded across barren desert.
Also come to life your two men
clubbing each other, mired to their knees
in muck that will keep them mired
even when battered to death,
suicidal corpse held tight
beneath a sky unconcerned
with right or wrong, grief or deliverance.
Victims and veterans might hear
Walt Whitman: I think I could turn
and live with animals,
they are so placid and self-contain’d,
I stand and look at them long and long.
David Campbell is 88 years old and has been a landscape painter since age 21 and a poet for almost as long.
