286 PART THREE
believing the great, dark moose
would come, his eyes
on fire with the moon.He fell asleep, the moose “came roaring,”
His horns exploded in the brush
with dry trees cracking
and falling.When the dreamer called to him, the moose “gently rubbed / his horns against
the icy willows,” then “soundlessly he walked away.”
I stood there in the moonlight,
and the darkness and silence
surged back, flowing around me,
full of a wild enchantment,
as though a god had spoken.Haines’s respect for the nonhuman world doesn’t mean staying detached, like
Elizabeth Bishop from her Nova Scotia moose, or so restrained as Gary Snyder
in Washington’s North Cascades:
unseen
Cold proud eyes
Of Cougar or Coyote
Watch me rise and go.He rubs a piece of horn, sees eyes on fire with the moon, hears horns exploding,
finds wild enchantment and pagan godlike presence. Stopping short of Romantic
overkill, Haines stands before the supernatural as a shaman sensing “the inmost
human experience on this earth,” his dream of that earth.
A poem conjuring “shaggy tribesmen” listens for prehistoric animals tram-
pling the grass—“this is how it all began”—and ends, “We are still kneel-
ing / and listening.” “Prayer to the Snowy Owl” begins, “Descend, silent
spirit.” Our food and drink, culture, religion, art, poetry, thought itself, “are
all part of the one process at work.” From the earliest, so-called primitive cave
and rock drawings to modern poems, from the classical Chinese poetry Haines
prizes to his Alaskan story, humankind is enmeshed within nature at large,
drawing sustenance and imagination both.
He values this “ancient dialogue”:
Among the Dogon in West Africa, an individual gifted in divination will go
outside the village in the evening, and on a space of clean, raked sand will
draw certain signs in a more or less geometrical pattern. When he is done,
he will carefully and strategically scatter peanuts or other food scraps over
his table of signs. During the night a jackal, lured from the nearby bush, will