Jack Pines, Jack-in-the-Pulpits,
Porcupines
My grandfather taught me about Jack
pines
Jack-in-the-pulpits, porcupines—
I’d never seen one when he told me
they’d eat
anything, like lumber soaked in
creosote
soaked in creosote, he told me more
than once
and the tires off your car, porcupines
would eat
so he used to drop cinder blocks on
them
back when there were porcupines there
he told me
maybe not more than once but I remember
to kill them, maybe more than once he
told me
for he was not ashamed; why should he
have been
when they would eat the tires right off
your car
and lumber soaked in creosote. And I
have
interrupted a porcupine here, twice
as it ate my pressure-treated porch
and it ambled off, chattering annoyed
like a surly drunk stumbling over its
feet
like it wasn’t made to walk, let alone
run
away from danger and it wasn’t
for why should it have been—it embodied
all the millions of barbed encounters
with millions of tender attackers
over thousands of years of its species
and it knew what its car-wrecked kin
have known:
it is invincible
it is immovable
and it won’t be threatened
by you, only bothered—
and Jack-in-the-pulpits, my grandfather
taught me
are rare, and so they are special
and Jack pines need fire
to continue
On Myself and a Mouse
I’d decided to give myself up
for Lent, or maybe longer,
and live in simple openness
to the influx of existence.
It was going all right until
the night I caught a mouse
in the house
in a jar.
My unwillingness to accept this
cohabitating rodent,
the grating on me of
the grinding of its teeth,
already betrayed some failure
of releasement on my part,
but not as much
as what came next.
I knew if I let it go
on the porch or in the yard
it’d chew its way right back
into my house and brain,
so I took it across the road
jumping in its jar.
I set it down
and I listened
as it scurried off and then
I worried it might get eaten
before it figured out
what to do with itself—
but here’s what really hit me
with heartsickness over
what I’d done
to the mouse:
I felt it would’ve been kinder
to kill it than to take it
somewhere it couldn’t come back
from
to whatever was its own.
I don’t know that it cared.
I don’t know that it could.
But I could care.
Did I ever.
How You Might Discover the Prime Mover for
Yourself
Imagine Aristotle, pot-bellied, working
out
how he’d gotten into his present
predicament,
like you might have done when you were
having your first mid-
life crisis: maybe you tried to think
back, figure out
how it was the whole thing started, but
you discovered
for each apparent inaugural event in
turn
some inauspicious antecedent, such
that, lacking
a fixed first premise, you could find
no satisfying
conclusion to your argument with
yourself. Ergo
you may have given up, accepted that
you couldn’t
explain or justify a thing, and gone on
as if
nothing required that of you. But not
Aristotle.
The slightest sense he’d suffer to make
explain itself,
stretch his brain on the rack of it,
until it gave up
its source, in so many words, the archē
of it all.
But it would have said anything just to
make him stop.
On Frost’s Oft-Quoted Line “No Surprise
for the Writer … ”
Dear reader, you will not be surprised
by this poem,
any more than I was in writing it.
Don’t expect
to laugh or cry or be moved by it in
any way.
You will not be transformed; you will
not be made to see
anything differently. You won’t gasp,
sigh, or even
linger, a little confused and nearly
satisfied,
at the end. Expect only that these
familiar marks,
in their hardly less familiar patterns
on the page,
by some inscrutable mechanism will mean
something
to you—nothing meaningful, but
they’ll mean, like the words
“six hippopotamuses are singing on the
moon”
manage to mean something somehow the
same as themselves—
and this, as always, will seem wholly
unsurprising.
Matthew King used to teach philosophy at York University in Toronto; he now lives in what Al Purdy called "the country north of Belleville", where he tries to grow things, counts birds, takes pictures of flowers with bugs on them, and walks a rope bridge between the neighbouring mountaintops of philosophy and poetry. His photos and links to his poems can be found at birdsandbeesandblooms.com.