Better Angels

The section of the woods I call the moss garden was full of death angels today. The camera in my phone doesn’t quite know what to do with them, too deathly pale against the rain-darkened moss — they throw the white balance completely off.

I pass a porcupine just as she’s emerging from her door at the base of an oak. She must’ve heard me coming — her bristles are up. I stop and say Hi in a friendly voice. She gazes back, her beady eyes unreadable, retreating into the tree as I continue past.

I used to say that the porcupine was my totem animal but I don’t make that joke anymore. I let the boutique left convince me that this represented a heinous appropriation of indigenous culture. It’s true that more than once in my life porcupines have appeared like omens or indeed guides precisely when I most needed them. But I am not enough of a narcissist to believe they actually bother about me at all. Occam’s Razor suggests instead that they are simply wild creatures going about their lives, which randomly intersect with our own.

Which is part of the attraction, of course. The ideal guide would ignore me altogether! How dreary to be somebody, as one of my dead role models once said. I just want to vanish like a needle into the world’s haystack.

I should add somewhat parenthetically though that as a poet, one gets used to ascribing meaning to events in nature in a largely playful way, which preserves the autonomy of its actors apart from our narrative webs. This is the power of the lyric mode to elevate meaning without abstracting it from all context in the ummwelt. It’s why I believe everyone should practice poetry. It softens the hard lines between things. Its highest truths always take the form of a paradox.

For twenty minutes after the rain stops, the tree I’m sitting against keeps dripping on my boot. Arching my neck back, I can watch the drop gathering to fall, then feel it on my toes two seconds later: the sort of simple, synesthetic pleasure money can’t buy.

The same tree is dropping acorns, and that too is a pleasure: the minor thrill each time of having been passed over by the angel of hard knocks. Until I’m not, and a lump sprouts atop my head like a lizard’s third eye. I’ll open it every full moon.