Squirrel Icarus
You see them hold
their spiral lines
without mistake
you think like
Earth
knows how to keep
from tipping over
into outer space—
today I looked
in time to catch
one
twist around
an empty line
and grasping
nothing
disappear
to land behind my
shed—
I marked its error
but I didn’t
run to stare
it isn’t that
I didn’t care but
out of the blue
somebody’s always
falling
Six Tanka On a Stupid Chipmunk
1.
Look at this
chipmunk.
He’s a complete
idiot!
How is he
alive?
He’s an adult
with many
responsibilities.
Wow!
2.
He’s gotten
himself
cornered by three
cats again.
The wise one
places
a paw on his head
and then
lets him go—till
tomorrow.
3.
He bites the
heads off
my tender
seedlings and drinks
the sap they pump
out.
Isn’t that clever
of him?
No, he just bites
everything.
4.
Sometimes he
stands still,
stares straight
ahead seemingly
at nothing, and
chirps
monotonously for
hours
on end. I’m not
kidding. Hours.
5.
Chasing another
chipmunk he runs
right into
my boot. If I
felt
like it I could
stomp him to
death. He has no
idea.
6.
Now he’s drowned
himself
in the shallow
water bowl
I left in the
shade.
I thought I was
helping him.
It isn’t my
fault, I think.
On a Chipmunk at the End of Time
Like so many
familiar summer sounds
its source is so
normally out of sight
you might make up
a story, maybe mix
one up with
another you were told once
about something
else, like when we were kids
we said the
hiss-hiss-hiss in the grass was
grass snakes and
the buzz-zz-zz in the trees
was tree frogs—I
probably didn’t know
it wasn’t frogs
until one day the cat
came in with a
half-strangled cicada,
displacing
cold-blooded narrative with
its passionate
natural history.
Crickets, and
whatever things other than
crickets make the
sounds we say are crickets,
are so constant
that it takes an effort
to notice them,
and this is also true
of stranger
background noises such as these
peculiar chirps
the particular sound
of
which—something like a wood block being
struck struck
struck—we’ve never heard
explained. Birds?
Generally
speaking you might suppose (I
suppose I did
suppose) they sound like birds
sounding
unremarkably unlike birds.
But two hours ago
I traced the chirping
to a chipmunk
standing under my car.
It’s been
standing there ever since, chirping
like a wood block
struck struck struck. What does it
mean by this? I
mean, what is moving it
to do what it’s
doing, I mean, not to
move but stand
there chirping all afternoon?
Everything it had
to do for today
must be done, and
if it’s done for today
then for what
remains of summer, and if
for summer then
what remains of the year,
this year. What
need to gather does it feel
now? The time for
gathering is finished
or close to
finished as it ever is—
how can a
chipmunk know? How can it know
how long the
winter is in front of it,
how deep below
the ground it has to go,
how many seeds
and nuts it has to store,
and which of them
are imperishable?
It knows: days
shorter, shadows longer, time
(whatever time
is) up. Today we ate
tomatoes dripping
the redness they wrung
from withered
vines and we gathered ourselves
as we were moved
to sound, to speak, and stop.
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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.