I never quite understood how violent it is
To imagine ourselves the subject and everything else
Predicate, as when the Corps of Discovery
Passed along the river near here
And Merriweather Lewis named it
“With the most eminent appropriateness,”
For his more cheerful and lower-ranking friend
Lieutenant Clark, who’d set off days before
To pioneer a route he abandoned.
I never foresaw how thickets happen,
Until a flock of Clark’s nutcrackers
Drifted off Wisherd Ridge in autumn
And foraged the ponderosas all winter,
Shaking down seeds they caught in the air,
Making abundance months-long play.
Some later ornithological dispute about
The nutcracker’s Adamic name—Clark
Thought woodpecker, or his better guess, Crow--
Kindly others intervened to correct.
Who really can say if amendment offers
Any insight at all? Birds and river had names,
But those were agglutinative,
Hard to catch much less say
And harder yet to transliterate on the fly
Then pronounce without embellishment
For sponsors in the salons back East.
Save for one of the discovered
Accompanying the Corps who spoke
More languages than the others--
They were men, after all, they could
Hardly ask for help or directions.
To query the local gloss about this
“Clucking of a fowl and noise of a parrot,”
Warranted a further account, and not only
Of the nutcracker’s laughter
Or the river’s soft, defiant hiss.
To imagine ourselves the subject and everything else
Predicate, as when the Corps of Discovery
Passed along the river near here
And Merriweather Lewis named it
“With the most eminent appropriateness,”
For his more cheerful and lower-ranking friend
Lieutenant Clark, who’d set off days before
To pioneer a route he abandoned.
I never foresaw how thickets happen,
Until a flock of Clark’s nutcrackers
Drifted off Wisherd Ridge in autumn
And foraged the ponderosas all winter,
Shaking down seeds they caught in the air,
Making abundance months-long play.
Some later ornithological dispute about
The nutcracker’s Adamic name—Clark
Thought woodpecker, or his better guess, Crow--
Kindly others intervened to correct.
Who really can say if amendment offers
Any insight at all? Birds and river had names,
But those were agglutinative,
Hard to catch much less say
And harder yet to transliterate on the fly
Then pronounce without embellishment
For sponsors in the salons back East.
Save for one of the discovered
Accompanying the Corps who spoke
More languages than the others--
They were men, after all, they could
Hardly ask for help or directions.
To query the local gloss about this
“Clucking of a fowl and noise of a parrot,”
Warranted a further account, and not only
Of the nutcracker’s laughter
Or the river’s soft, defiant hiss.
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David Axelrod's most recent collection is Skiing with Dostoyevsky: New & Selected Poems. Individual poems have appeared recently in About Place, Hole in the Head Review, Under a Warm Green Linden, and Zocolo. He founded Bear Scratch Press and teaches letterpress printing at the University of Montana. He lives in a former gravel pit outside Missoula, where he holds an 1889 water right and tends a native plants nursery.
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