Robert Wrigley

Explanatory

The hackberry tree, a static of twigs and branches
so densely woven sparrows went flitless there
and hopped instead, stob to stob, and disappeared
like names, dates, and faces in an ordinary mind.
It was the bowl at the top I wanted to see for myself, 
twig-sack of heft and weave, broad
as the hindquarters of a bull, nest of dozen
generations of eagle, heron, or hawk.
I had studied it for an hour and seen no sign of life
but saw a way up, beside the hackberry, up
the thigh-high thick limbs of the yellow pine,
then out its long crooked pitch-dripping finger
pointing inside the snarl and bracing maybe
the nest itself. Even then I felt myself the fool I was,
in that deep green chapel light climbing,
having lost the sun, seeing in every crotch of bark
a voodoo-beautiful arrangement of rodents’ bones.
I found the limb and sat it well, like a horse,
and skidded my way outwards, seeing from under the canopy
of needles how this mount was swallowed in hackberry’s thatch,
how the limbs of one had grown inside the other, until
on the last yard or less I was back in the sun, half-blind
and wobbling to my feet, letting my bare, tacky hands ascend
the nest’s outer wall. A single foot shy of the lip,
I placed my ear to it, a body of ribs. There was no heart
to be heard beneath the wind’s long breath blowing by,
though by and by, my eyes at last unblinking, I saw
how just above my cheek a rabbit's skull swayed
in a thong of its own delicate leather, how the last round mound
between my hair and the nest's open maw
was a Joseph’s coat of hide and sun-dried skin. Slowly,
slowly, like predator, or prey, I lifted my right leg
and nestled it in among the tight-woven branches.
And there was nothing there but my arms, elbows locked
among the stobs and hoisting me up and up, nothing
until the horned owl came out flying,
leaping, hooked beak wide and blue-gray tongue protruding,
a mother-noise a million years old
that even as I fell, screeching myself, I kept on hearing.
It was her talon that tore the palm of my hand,
or a bone or a branch, it was something I held
that held me back, or seemed to as I fell, my legs
by the miracle of it swinging beneath me again,
so that I landed belly-down across the same pitchy branch
I’d entered on, then slung myself sloth-like from it
and dangled there, my eyes twisted shut,
my heart making wing-beat bird after bird,
my breath a mix of man’s gasp and rabbit bleat.
And this is why my life- and heart lines are joined inside my fist,
a kind of canal of the flesh, a path from knowing to faith.
Therefore, I have crawled along the thoroughfares of snakes
with a bedsheet, looking to rescue a broken-winged owl.
Therefore, when a grass fire swept toward it, I ran
to that same, swaybacked, fuel-dense hackberry tree
and pummeled it with stones and howled
until they rose—one, two, three, cat-faced and immense—
great horned owls gone into smoke through the going-down sun.

ROBERT WRIGLEY teaches at the University of Idaho. His most recent book is Reign of Snakes (Penguin, 1999), which was awarded the Kinsgley Tufts Award for 2000.

“I was getting ready to move, with my family, from the place where we’d lived for ten years—most of my children's lives. We weren’t moving far away—from the canyon of the Clearwater River to the heights of Moscow Mountain, just forty miles as the owl flies—but the landscape would be altogether new. The canyon is the birdiest place I’ve ever seen, or perhaps I should say the predatory birdiest place: four or five kinds of hawks, bald and golden eagles, osprey, and of course owls. And in my years of walking that country, I’d often walked past, under, around, the massive nest the poem “Explanatory” describes, and when I returned from my walk one morning, the nest simply presented itself when I put pencil to paper. I wanted to remember it as it deserved.
     There may be more to explain about the narrative—its intents and connections—but all I’m really willing to say is that, for me, the poem must make the reader see what she hears and hear what she sees. If that’s done well, the intents and connections will take care of themselves.”

“Explanatory” appears in our Winter 2000 issue.

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