As soon as I crossed the border,
most of the tightness faded, left
behind with the duty I'd felt
to acquaint myself with each day's
horrors - deaths in Gaza, deaths in
Sudan, deaths in Ukraine, dirty
water and sickening food in
camps in Texas and Florida
where they shoved people for being
people from someplace else, the lies,
the evil stupidity, the
lies, the thefts, the lies, the greed, the
corruption and hypocrisy,
the lies, the cruelty, the lies,
the brutal;ty, and the lies.
All that fell away from me. While
in the land of the blessed fox,
I walked for miles every day,
and devoted most of my most
earnest thought to what's for dinner.
(Scallops frozen at sea - so much
fresher than those labeled as "fresh" -
sauteed in butter to a point
just this side of firmness, with the
merest sprinkle of pepper and
salt, and lemon squeezed so the juice
drips off fingers to lick clean.)
I watched the early morning sun
gild the shoreland's stunted brush
behind my tent and the lurid
green, plastic Adirondack chairs
around the fire pit. I watched a
flock of terns celebrate sunset,
playing aerial chicken in
the waning light over the sea.
One evening, another flock
dove into a fish buffet just
beyond the surf, and two of them,
it seemed for the pure joy of it,
performed an extended, graceful,
acrobatic, marvelously
synchronized, wing-tip to wing-tip,
aerial pas-de-deux. Next day,
I was walking through the woods, when,
thirty yards ahead on the path,
a big, black lump rose to its feet.
Is that a dog? I thought. How large,
and where is its owner? Then, the black,
round ears, like those on a Mickey
Mousketeers hat, registered; my
sense of scale asserted itself;
I halted. It looked me over.
It looked to me as big as the world.
Deciding I was not worth the
trouble of closer acquaintance,
the bear turned, ambled off the path,
and vanished into the forest.
Next day, I watched a blue heron
eat an eel: a lengthy process.
By luck or poor judgment, the eel
had swum too near where the heron's
toothpick stilts of legs held it poised
and waiting above the tide flat.
When I saw them, the heron's beak
gripped the eel just behind the head,
and shook it, not vigorously,
not trying to break it, rather
as if to check its resistance.
Then the heron dropped the eel and
watched it thrash around, twisting and
writhing in circles, for a while.
Capable of motion, the eel
seemed incapable of escape.
As if choosing its moment, the
heron jabbed the six-inch needle
of its beak into the eel, then
picked it up and shook it again,
none too vigorously, dropping
it to squirm again at its feet.
This went on, over and over.
Each time, the eel moved weaklier.
At last, the eel was limp with death.
The heron tweezed the eel up and
consumed it, head first, slowly, like
a diner sucking down a long,
very thick strand of spaghetti.
Not long after that, I returned
back below the border, and felt
my shoulders tense with the burden
of living with other people's
choices, and also with my own.
