From Our Backyard to Yours

LETTER FROM ROCK CREEK
For Mary Oliver

I want to ask you what that clicking sound
is for, rising out of Rock
Creek Park, below my little room; but even you
can’t help me pin that down—so many miles
from here, where you are tucked in bed, your
little room, your neck and chin concealed by the bark
of a burnt sienna scarf;
so I leave it
as it is, our mood music, and I remember
shore-days in the Provincetown house,
reading in Hopkins Send my roots rain,
or anything by Keats, who was
drowned in his ceiling made of flowers,
while this click in the background
persists, not cricket, some smallestinsect-
on-record, small enough to be
a gnat’s pilot, small like a certain quality
you have courted in your poems, how you squint
and bend down to things, how you do not disturb
their place, how this characteristic expands
in my mind exponentially as the objects
themselves grow tinier: the closed hood
of the mushroom’s umbrella at night,
or the clam, an Osiris, locked in its bivalves,
which made a nice supper—how the God
appears altered, altared, each time you look—even the
scrape of one wing against the other’s
leathery file, to stridulate, to make a click that carries
in mathematical waves, while this singer, untroubled
by itself, goes on fine without an advocate, a name.

— David Keplinger