"Bivouac"

Annie Dillard



I.

The she-wolf whelps in thunder.
The new-born prophet licks his palms
to clean his face like a cat.
You wake on the shore, weeping,
biting your own salt knee.

	You remember, don't you?
	You remember the sea,
	the deep sea, the pressure,
	and the pebbled shallows
	where the nurse sharks wait
	to heave you toward the light. . . .
	
You wake on the shore,
sand and gravel under your back,
wrack and sand in your hair.
Blink, and the light gives way
to the fixed and waterless stars.

You wake. The ocean
is furling its green tons down.
Volcano weather.
The sharp-shinned hawk
cleaves with intricate strain
to the skin of air rivers rising,
spreading, peeling half over
and off to the side like a leaf.

This is the mainland,
this heaping of stones and the pines.
And the barnacles ---
remember? ---
when the water came over,
you waved your feathery arms.

The sky never ceases to widen,
hollow, over your head.
You can fashion
a fish-life here on the coast,
willow-strip, driftwood
and dugout, or go in
to a land already planted.

	You remember, don't you?
	You remember the forest,
	the deep jungle, the tree ferns,
	the club mosses, the green air;
	turning a golden eye to watch
	the lizards still on the stones. . . .

There's a forest inside, straight wood,
a mud clearing, and a man
on his knees shaking feathers,
owl feathers, owl tongues, twisted
to sinew and thong.

And there's desert inside,
caves and a woman
splitting her lips with a thorn.
This is your son, and your daughter.

	You remember, don't you?
	You remember the plains,
	the wind, the hot grass,
	hefting a gritty rock
	to split thick bones and suck
	the bloody grease. . . .
	
Follow the rivers, look for a pass,
or follow the ridges, rise.
There are no eyes on you.
You were kindled from a clot
and washed on the beach like a conch
from one more witless wave.


II.

You have never been so tired.

The wooded ridges roll under the sun
like water, and none of the mountains home,
and all of the mountains bivouac,
campaigner; lean-to, hoe-down, shack-up, run.


III.

A baby is a pucker
of the earth's thin skin;
he swells, circles, and lays him down.

The lakes fill, the ice rolls back,
(the ice rolls up!) the ice rolls back,
the skin wrinkles and splits ---
fishes, grass --- the skin
bunches and smooths.

You die, you die.
First you go wet
and then you go dry.

This is the end,
the dry channel,
the splintered sluice,
where you slake your thirst on chert.
There's a spread to the light
and a rising, a way
that even the air is a cobra;
and at night
the rock moon and the desert rock
bat the dead light back
and forth till it snaps.

You sleep
under a ledge away from the river bed;
you wake
to the sun looming low like the mouth
of a tunnel to hell.
A scale-legged bird is eating a snake.
Dig for mice. Smell
your shoulder. There's been
flash-flood, dust-storm,
rivers run in and moved out
like haunts, and still those two round lights,
the fire-light and the ash;
and still you wake, you wake a million days,
and walk.

Oh yes,
it's a hard slide,
it's a rough winter,
what with the sharp gravel
and acid salts in the sand.
You're softshell and peeled,
with nothing to keep out the wind ---
the williwaw, cheechako ---
that splits the cell and drains it dry as ash.


IV.

You have walked beyond
the highest tide and seen
how, where birds have landed,
walked, and flown,
their tracks begin in sand,
and go, and suddenly end.
Our tracks do that, but we go down.

Where have we been,
and why do we go down?
At night your best-loved dead appear
back, and start their stare.
You wake; you greet them;
you wake again; the dead still steer
their sleeping course,
their sleeping heels in the air.

Hold fast.
Duck.
There's a flat-out, flinging way
the clouds begin their dive,
there's a scurf of earth and air
so thin
you'd step clear through
or blow clean off.

	You remember it all:
	How you lungless lay in slime,
	how you shied across the plain
	on your sharp split hoof,
	the mist, the sip of ozone on the tongue. . . .

You wake. This is the mainland.
Here you must look
at each thing with the elephant eye:
greeting it now for the first time,
and bidding, forever, good-bye.

Ease her when she pitches.
Keep your tinder dry.