On naming the beasts
things change, but they also don't change at all
Today is September 11 and we’re sitting up in bed drinking coffee and listening to the memorial coverage on the radio. I’m also looking at screech owl photos on my laptop. Last night, we both woke up with a jolt. Usually the owl sounds are muffled and way off in the distance and we have to concentrate to hear them. But at 3:00 am, for sure, a little owl was in the backyard hunting something tiny and furry on the ground.
“I want to squeeze him,” says Janyce.
“Do you think we can look for them in the trees on our walk today? They are supposed to be really hard to find, though,” I say.
I have a sudden urge to name the screech owl that lives in the woods behind our house, just like Janyce named the woodchuck in the backyard. “Woodman” has the run of the place now. He pokes his head out daily from his underground labyrinth of tunnels in our yard. He sniffs around, and then comes out to nibble the grass. We set up the Labor Day weekend tent in the front yard this year mostly to leave him alone. I thought maybe instead we could all watch the three hummingbirds fight for dominance at the feeder in the front garden. But they had already left for warmer climes, now that the air at night and in the mornings has turned to that school bus chill.
Things change, but they also don’t change at all. Woodman’s getting fatter every day and soon he’ll be gone, fast asleep for the winter under the shed. With any luck, he’ll be back again in spring.
A bell rings on the radio and signals a moment of silence.
There are fresh horrors on the radio every day. But this horror remains acute. It’s almost impossible to describe how it feels today with the sun shining bright outside, the sky blue and clear, just like it was that morning twenty years ago when I sat in my car listening to the radio and trying to comprehend how a plane from Boston could fly into one of the twin towers. But sometimes only a poem can capture the feeling.
I leave you with one of those.
NAMING THE BEASTS
By Elizabeth Morton
The planes went down the same day Romulus and Remus
were butchered.
And I walked barefoot through the cattlegrass,
mooed to Romulus and Remus
and they said how do you do?
as though it were an ordinary Tuesday.
As though the stock truck
parked outside the old schoolhouse
were just a metaphor for everything
thrust into double digits. The sky was cheesecake.
Sweetgums were bald to skin and bone. Wind licked
the bluegrass, retelling comedies
only the weather sees. What world is this?
Romulus and Remus were the hot breath
rising from the schoolhouse kettle,
the two sparrows that knocked against the car windshield
on that lonely highway. They were a pair of headlights.
They were possums spent on nightfall, giddy
with the casual light of passing tankers.
Romulus and Remus loped onto the truck ramp,
Said how do you do? And I. And I. And I.
I walked barefoot through embers only to turn back halfway,
to shrug at the ordinary Tuesday, to let what happens
happen. I hid from the bellowing, under husk and chaff,
in the noise of harrower and winnower.
Later, I sat in the diner, watched two planes go down on a city,
into the stubble of people and places
just doing what people and places do.
As though little men falling from windows
were just a metaphor for everything haunted
by what we never fix.
July 2019, Editor’s Choice
Comment from the editor of Rattle, Timothy Green: I fell in love with the turns and turns of phrase in this poem, and those two cows loping toward their fate, and I realized that it would have been late-winter in the southern hemisphere, the first buds of spring not quite appearing on the trees. That thought opened something up for me—something about the combination of vastness and interconnectedness of the world—and I’ll never think of 9/11 in quite the same way again.