Camille T. Dungy

Trophic Cascade


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How Great the Gardens When They Thrive 64

       Commute 66

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       oh my dear ones 69

       Notes and Acknowledgments 73

      Natural History

      The Rufous hummingbird builds her nest

      of moss and spider webs and lichen.

      I held one once—smaller than my palm,

      but sturdy. I would have told Mrs. Jeffers,

      from Court Street, if in those days of constant flights

      between California and Virginia I’d wandered

      into that Oakland museum. Any chance

      I could, I’d leave my rented house in Lynchburg.

      I hated the feeling of stuckness that old city’s humidity

      implied. You need to stop running away so much,

      Mrs. Jeffers would say when my visits were over

      and I leaned down to hug her. Why her words

      come to me, the woman dead for the better part

      of this new century, while I think of that

      nest of web and lichen, I cannot rightly say.

      She had once known my mother’s parents.

      The whole lot of them, even then, in their twenties,

      must already have been as old as God. They were

      black—the kind name for them in those days

      would have been Negroes—and the daily elections

      called for between their safety and their sanity

      must have torn even the strongest of them down.

      Mr. Jeffers had been a laborer. The sort, I regret,

      I don’t remember. He sat on their front porch

      all day, near his oxygen tank, waving occasionally

      to passing Buicks and Fords, praising the black

      walnut that shaded their yard. She would leave

      the porch sometimes to prepare their meals.

      I still have her yeast roll recipe. The best

      I’ve ever tried. Mostly, though, the same Virginian

      breeze that encouraged Thomas Jefferson’s

      tomatoes passed warmly through their porch eaves

      while we listened to the swing chains, and no one

      talked or moved too much at all. Little had changed

      in that house since 1952. I guess it’s no surprise

      they’d come to mind when I think of that cup

      of spider webs and moss, made softer by the feathers

      of some long-gone bird. She used to say, I like it

      right here where I am. In my little house. Here,

      with him. I thought her small-minded. In the winter,

      I didn’t visit very often. Their house was closed up

      and overheated. Everything smelled of chemical

      mothballs. She had plastic wrappers on the sofas

      and chairs. Everyone must have once

      held someone as old and small and precious as this.

      Before the fetus proves viable, a stroll creekside in the High Sierra

      It seems every one is silvered, dead,

      until we learn to see the living—

      beaked males and females clutching

      their hundred thousand roe—

      working muscle, fin, and scale

      against the great laws of the universe—

      current, gravity, obsolescence, and the bears

      preparing for their torpor, clawing

      the water for weeks, this rich feed

      better than any garbage bin—and these still

      living red ones, who made it past all that,

      nuzzling toward a break in the current,

      everything about them moving, moving

      yet hardly moving forward at all.

      “still in a state of uncreation”

      Little eradicator. Little leaser.

      Little loam collector, connoisseur

      of each vestigial part. Little bundle

      of nerve. Waste leaker. Pump.

      Little lead-in, lean-to, least known,

      lucky landing. Bean, being, borne

      by me. Little consequence.

      Little ruckus causer. Unborn.

      Little insatiable. Little irrevocable.

      Little given. Little feared.

      Little living. Little seen. Little

      dangler. Little delight. Little

      growing. Little life. Little you.

      Ars Poetica: Mercator Projection

       Windhoek to Walvis Bay

      Pulp the plant and plant it new, that’s what termites do. We learned that from books one devoured while the other was driving. From the conferences convened inside the car. We’d come down from the highlands. Come out of acacia trees and into acacia bushes. We taught ourselves to gauge the age of a termite mound by the age of the acacia beside it. We founded a college, which grew into a university, for we had space and time. I watched one colonial town fade from the rearview and then nothing until another white-washed town wavered in our windows, its petrol station in view a long while. I grew restless with little to do but stitch and re-stich my notions. We had assumed we would hop in the car and arrive there shortly. We hadn’t adjusted our perspective yet. We wouldn’t adjust our perspective for hundreds of years. I spied with my little eyes: several journeys of giraffe, a congress of baboons, a pride of ostrich (baby ostrich, mama ostrich, ostrich—gray and white and black of feather, gray and white and black of feather, gray and white and black of feather—of an uncertain age), kudu—brown and beige of pelt and antler, brown and beige of pelt and antler—and signs warning kudu jump into the road. Nearly indistinguishable from the bush, all this life lived on before us. We sighted oryx with black noses to draw heat off their brains, an implausibility of wildebeest, a band of mongoose, and several confusions of guinea fowl fowling the road. At first, we felt as close to God as Adam, and as headlong, naming every beast and bird and bush with plastic specificity. I didn’t know an eland from a hartebeest, but the naming made them. We felt satisfied until we noticed how far we were past our star’s highest hour. We had descended from bushes to succulents. Driven from succulents to little but lichen scattered close to the stony ground. This reminds me of Lubbock, of the scratchy plains outside of Lubbock, one of us noted,