My larkspur (Delphinium) has been blooming for many months. Just when I think they have stopped blooming
I see some more beautiful blue over somewhere else. The intense color is quieting.
Mercy Me
said the womenfolk where I was raised,
and in my mind mercy was a verb, the action reflexive.
Though of course the wolf in the kingdom of winter does not mercy the elk.
The owl does not mercy the hare that has trembled loose from its delicate coat of stillness.
The word has been used since the twelfth century to mean God's forgiveness of his creatures' offenses.
Such mercy is not what my father had in mind when he asked me to take a pistol to live in the wilderness.
I didn't. That was not how I imagined my days, strapping its cold weight to my hip,
a saunter to the river: Good morning larkspur, good morning death camas and moon-flower:
I am more deadly than you.
Would I slip it into the crook of the quince tree while I crouched to weed kale?
And would I, after all, shoot a bear eclipsing my doorway? Would I shoot a man?
Back home, another gun in the safe where my bedroom dresser used to stand.
Out there, the news, a loaded gun, returns again and again to the loaded gun.
Here the old growth murmurs at night, the dark's bones groan and creep.
Once, barefoot in starlight the color of ginger root, trembling on the porch at the unknowable's cacophony,
the dog in a huff,I wondered if the fear, in the end, would get me first.
On the long, hawk-spangled drive east, all things appeared to me as bodies:
the log haulers piled with the fallen forms of fir coming down from the mountains,
chicken trucks with their live cargoes crushed into hunchback and the smashed daisies of feathers
from which a dim red eye looks out.
Across the frostbit flatlands of Idaho, gleaming silver trucks piled with fleshy potatoes: bodies, bodies,
and on the radio a story about a body unearthed from high in the Andes,
a woman's form arrayed with spear and ax-head, a big-game hunter.
I want to summon a blessing on this vanishing year—but I forget how this works, what to say, in what order.
I'm thinking of my good Aunt who for all those years and even after the chemo and the electro-shock therapy
tucked her pale delicate chin at table and said with quavering but without irony, We give thanks.
The moon's between the fir's ribs, up there in the god-dark black.
The fox still moves in the roots and the rust.
You could say and not lie that this is most of what I long for in the way of distance and the way of desire:
may the fetters fall from all of us this year.
May the wild light get way down in our bones.
May we without requital, mercy one another with hands like wings, with unarmed hands.
Corrie Williamson (2022)
(Read it three times and it will cling to you.)
