A catfish has over 27,000 taste buds. Imagine
the taste of the Mississippi.
Sweet, or oily as fried hair? Nitrates, asphalt,
shat mud, or pesticide on the laces of a child’s cerebrum?
I’ve watched—
tallgrasses roll in slow combers, in swells, upsurge, and shining,
Carolina hoppers beat against my thigh, little ricochets of fear,
a fawn puddled under a hem of honeysuckle,
and a flicker, probably. I don’t know all the birds.
But I know the diction my body has learned to speak—
kettle, wetland, deer beds, vernal ponds,
straight-line winds, oak grove, sward—
a knowing gained by going out,
by the eye’s emending,
by the thorn-stick of a honey locust.
Near a forgotten prairie creek,
a great blue heron wingbeats into flight,
trembles a branch with silence.
How poorly I’ve read those wild distances,
the rising script of tallgrasses,
the way a Cooper’s hawk renders light.