David Orr

Lepisosteus osseus Despite it all, something stirs at the sight Of the cool, enameled body, The unreflecting eye, And the long jaw like a chisel With its single, violent purpose. It hangs dead still at the water's surface And seems lifeless, until A flickering gesture Carves fish after fish From any school that swims too close And creates in the world a new absence, As if this might be the shaper As well as the defacer Of the damaged masterpiece Whose headless body hails the bodies Of the many Egyptians excised at Cyprus.

Not that anyone will care, But as I was sitting there On the 8:07 To New Haven, I was struck by lightning. The strangest thing Wasn't the flash of my hair Catching on fire, But the way people pretended Nothing had happened. For me, it was real enough. But it seemed as if The others saw this as nothing But a way of happening, A way to get from one place To another place, But not a place itself. So, ignored, I burned to death. Later, someone sat in my seat And my ashes ruined his suit.

My Uncle Fletcher, Our county seer, Bestowed his gifts On my no-good cousin Jeff, Who had a feeling About nearly everything. "That guy of hers . . ." "Those fucking queers . . ." He'd say, giving me the eye, Which was the same eye That could gaze upon A yellow froth of newborns, And know the cockerels From the pullets.

On the day we moved in, the pings, bumps, and snaps Were scary, it's true, but probably normal; A house accepting new patterns of weight With protest, the way no conviction goes gently. We laughed a little, and called it "our spirit." Later that night, when the power conked out And the kids were crying, the ghost got a name, "Daniel," and a history of whispered exploits, All of them harmless, like nursery rhymes, Or like the little fibs we tell ourselves To explain why this or that has led to suffering. Pretty soon, we were using him for everything. When the Christmas tree fell, it was "Daniel"; When my wife lost her ring, it was "Daniel"; When the kids forgot to feed the goldfish And it turned up dead, its eyes silvered over Like water shadowed under sheets of ice, Well, that became Daniel too, which was curious; And pauses me now as I make the long walk Down the hall to the bathroom in darkness, And hear, in soft concert, the sound of my footfalls Answered at once by my children's voices Still calling to Daniel behind their door.

For a birth The fact of the harp swells into the air, Alien and familiar and entirely too large, An elephant lost in the suburbs, And opens with its cry a strange passage Between the harp itself, the fragile harp, And the almost guilty knowledge Of   the stroke of   luck that brought it here And the care with which it must depart.

At last we decoded the terminal message, Only to find the pattern we had expected Was false — a false trail of false bread crumbs Designed to leave pitfalls undetected. We found a new pattern. We found a hand Moving pieces we had thought were only Part of  the board, and shifting them to vantage points We had ignored. We rewrote the battle plan And reconfigured the satellite array To show our progress from the very beginning. The fault should be traceable — and hence correctable — And once we found it, we’d be winning. We found a new pattern. We followed its track To a forest beside an abandoned tunnel Diving wide as a boxcar into the rock. A stale breeze blew over rusting shovels And all of our instruments confirmed a hit. We set a perimeter. We sent in a scout. From the interior, nothing looked back at us. No tracks indicated a force had come out. But we had a pattern. At dawn, we dispatched A team of our best, our trackers and stone killers, To see if  the signals were finally a match And if so, to counterattack. And now we wait. And now we wait. The tunnel gives nothing back. The trees are revealing the first signs of gold But the air is unmoving. The air is still. It is quiet here, and getting cold.