675: [chiasmus with all the other animals]
675: [chiasmus with all the other animals]
Transcript
I’m Ada Limón and this is The Slowdown.
It’s raining outside right now, green everywhere, violets and buttercups coming up, ivy already strangling the fence. Rickie Lee Jones is playing on the speaker in the house and my dog is drinking water in time with the bass line, so that she seems to be making music too. We are learning now about the atrocities in Ukraine and I’m both reading the news and avoiding the news. There are small animals moving under the hackberries and I can see them from the window, chipmunks and squirrels. I’m telling you this all at once because that is how it is happening…all at once. The war, the climate crisis, the robins pulling worms up in the rain.
It never ceases to astound me. This life. The vastness, the unbearable human violence, and then the small things too, the petals dropping right now from the neighbor’s cherry trees sticking to the fence line, piling up in the drainage ditch, the drops of rain hanging huge and with intention on the leafless branches of the Japanese maple. How can I bear this beauty and also bear the weight of this moment in our human tragedy? I don’t know. But I know I’ve dedicated my life to trying to figure it out. Or, at least trying to do it, trying to live with both, with all of it.
I do know this. When I am most at a loss, most untethered, I look to the natural world, to anything that is still continuing, still living, that will go on without us, and I find some sort of equanimity in that. It doesn’t feel like an answer or a fixed point, it feels like life. That’s what’s going on outside my window now. Life—mine, and the world’s.
Today’s poem does that beautiful work of balancing the grief and beauty of this human and non-human world. I love this poem for many reasons but especially for the way it creates a space for all of our emotions at once.
[chiasmus with all the other animals]
by Brenda Hillman
Curled thrush song staggering over moral tally Number is all wrote Baudelaire Fox kits hunting solitary voles So many beings here without despair From a box of words called a room We heard a protest in the distances The pall caul crawl through summer Struggling bees not yet out of work Cities were running out of sidewalks Where men could sleep Human life on the high fade Didn’t see plovers but saw yellow police tape Didn’t see whales chasing dots of krill Some might make it north Captain Ahab chasing minnows now Compared to what is this our earthly fear Roadside mosses seasonally moist rocks Unfailing dirt arriving from a star Straight from its lifelike origins ear Love keep love at the crossroads Of doing nothing & nothing doing Before the next ignorant machine opens Briefly & always to another life
"[chiasmus with all the other animals]" by Brenda Hillman. Originally published in Alta. Used by permission of the poet.