Can Poetry Save the Earth?: A Field Guide to Nature Poems

SOMETHING ALIVE IN MAY SWENSON 243

Unconscious U

came a beauty to my n

wrist c

and stopped my pencil, o

merged its shadow profile with n

my hand ’s ghost s

on the page: c

Red Spotted Purple or else Mourning i

Cloak, o

paired thin-as-paper wings, near black, u

were edged on the seam side poppy orange, s

as were its spots. Came a Beauty

I sat arrested, for its soot-haired

body’s worm

shone in the sun.

It bent its tongue long as

a leg

black on my skin

and clung without my

feeling,

while its tomb-stained

duplicate parts of

a window opened.

And then I

moved.

Why “arrested,” at the poem’s fulcrum? Fear of dislodging, awe at the shining?
Thanks to Swenson’s title splayed like antennae, this moment of arrest hinges
two stanzas to shape a coming of consciousness, of beauty.
Between “stopped my pencil” and “then I moved” a long stillness occurs,
though the creature ’s bending its tongue, clinging weightlessly, spreading