184OF HYBRIDITY AND THE HYBRIDSomething that was a whole story once,
unparaphrased by shadow.^41The speaker of the poem is aware that the arrival of the birds signals
some seemingly complete meaning, a “whole story” or “whole cloth”
either of the birds themselves, their history, or of something symbolic.
The “many black lowerings” of the birds (and her thoughts and words)
signify “knowledge,” something “absolutely true.” The birds have come
to the speaker and revealed themselves. This is a revelation, but the
speaker does not know what is revealed. “Perhaps as they hang on hang
on it is the afternoon? / Voice of what. Seems to say what.” The black
storks are symbols of death and birth, part of a larger world, like the
frozen river that the speaker is next to, in which everything is “doubled”:
present and past, the living and the dead, the above water and under-
water, and the above ground and underground. In this deep awareness of
the complexity of being, the speaker can only speak of “the creature, the
x” (italics in original), which is “me notched into place here,” as well as
every other creature in and along the river. The x is unnarratable—there
is no word for this sameness of being in her and the storks and the other
animals, only the “being here and then the feeling of being.” The poem’s
drive is toward an epiphany of shared animal being, pushing beyond
language into something irreducible and fundamental.
Everything has its moment.
The x gnaws on its bone.
When it’s time it will know.
Some part of it bleats, some part of it is
the front, has a face.But this “x” turns out not to be creaturely but something more disturb-
ing and unknowable. The knowledge that the speaker is driven toward
is not of animal being but something far more abstract and dispersed:
physical and historical forces that, like the water still flowing under the
frozen river, push the world and its particles (x) forward. So “x is on a