1.
It’s your shadow I seek
cool mystery.
2.
I stood once, in a natural history museum
under a California Condor,
stuffed, exhibited, a cautionary note
as eggs somewhere nearby
were carefully protected until hatched—
the young to be released and tracked
in the wild.
Now that was a shadow.
3.
But yours, the briefest greyness
shift of Rio Grande light.
4.
To address animals
in the 21st century
is to ignore
the reality of cyberspace,
the virtual penumbra,
and even
Plato’s legacy–perhaps?
5.
But still I come looking for you,
and more:
a habit of landscape which says
continuity,
which countenances
the four-wheeler ruts and your
consistent silence,
your disappearing act.
6.
To compensate:
Elegant simplicity,
like a sharp penciled stroke,
from the crown of your rounded head
down.
One grey movement.
7.
To admit to the art of you
without stinging flies
or gnats, skyward.
8.
We could never be that close
–to appreciate your mundaneness—
without stuffing you.
9.
There must be a nest on the bosque side
of the river, so developed in its bike trails
and horse farms.
You ignore barking dogs,
the exhaust fumes from nearby suburban streets,
in flight.
10.
And why not?
My feet are cold.
My socks are in the dryer.
It’s rainy today,
not a day for hunting shadows.
A day completed in shadow.
11.
I’ve been told
you stubbornly stay
in your favorite pond
even in winter
even sometimes as the ice forms
around your stilts for legs.
In a surprise season
you risk being frozen
in place
O fisherman.
12.
Lord of stillness
you proofread hunger.
You make a habit of
reverence.
13.
As far as I know
you are no
totem bird
But who cares?
This is no reality show.
14.
Like the fish
I come in seeming safety
under the shadow
of your wing.
Perhaps like them,
the instant before you
pluck them up,
maybe the instant
before they’re swallowed,
my heart skitters
at the promise
of a death so still.
15.
Memory, like shadow,
holds fast,
inverts its original.
16.
So still as to fool
our casual walk.
17.
Almost past, heads down
we pause in our conversation.
And you, there on the sand bank,
hunter
focus on the waters around you,
island below.
18.
And us.
19.
I get up,
eat dry cherrios.
I look for my glasses.
I think of a walk
down by the river.
20.
do we inhabit–
neither your careless frogs
nor beguiled fishes?
I know you will eat
anything to survive.
21.
Elegant simplicity:
like a sharp-penciled stroke,
from the crown of your rounded head
down.
One grey movement.
22.
Somewhere your secret nest.
Somewhere your shadow sits.
By Shelley Armitage
Shelley Armitage is professor emerita, the Roderick Professorship, at the University of Texas at El Paso. A former Fulbright Chair in American Literature, she has published eight award-winning books, the most recent an environmental memoir, Walking the Llano. She manages the family grasslands, source of her exploration of the creative space between memory and place.