“In Wildness is the Preservation of the World”

Hackney Marsh is part of a managed wilderness, a woods and wetland scrubby on one side and mucked-up with skunk cabbage and cowslip on most of the rest.  There’s a pond along the access road that’s thick by midsummer with water lilies and yellow spatterdock buds, our lowly hopes that white pine seedlings will sprout in the clearing.  Duck lovers have planted duck boxes.  Hunting here is permitted in autumn only and never on Sundays. 

The state has preserved us some wildness, Henry; now how are we to preserve the world?

It’s still ours, the windless afternoon,

That single cloud afloat on the sky,

Casting its purple aspersions on the lilies. 

Blackberry leaves, woody lichen, cherry twigs-

I put them all in my mouth, tasting. 

Dragonflies skitter and light on the ground. 

Last night I dreamt a plane went down

Nose first, its blue lights sizzling

in the pond.  No other sound but that smoke hiss. 

It wasn’t a nightmare. 

How often I’ve imagined paradise as the world

Without our human presence:

Ferns unfurling as ever, tadpoles

Shape-shifting to frogs.  Just the one species

Culled for the good of the whole. 

I’ve almost caught myself praying,

As on the silent wings of the owl, descend,

End the suffering.  What a fool I am,

Henry– we all are, and incorrigible,

In the lily pads’ shadows, oblivious

To me and the events that we call history,

Crayfish brandish their out-sized claws

Stirring up a minor maelstrom of leaf-silt

In defense of the leaf-silt and certain stones.