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

ZEST OF GALWAY KINNELL 311

from the earthen snout all the way

through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail.

“The Porcupine” sports everything physical, nothing human mixed in.

Fatted

on herbs, swollen on crabapples...

the porcupine

drags and bounces his last meal through ice,

mud, roses and goldenrod, into the stubbly high fields.

Eventually the voice turns first-person and is “beat dead with a locust club / on
the bare snout.” Kinnell ends in empathy.

And tonight I think I prowl broken

skulled or vacant as a

sucked egg in the wintry meadow, softly chuckling, blank

template of myself, dragging

a starved belly through the lichflowered acres.

Jagged lines break any smug standpoint, but where does “softly chuckling”
come from? Maybe our porcupine-poet, saying “tonight I think I prowl,” knows
something we do not. “I awaken I think,” we hear in “The Bear,” when the poem
has dreamt of lumbering in the carcass of a hunted bear. Without an empathy for
other living things, Kinnell warns, “we ’ll never save ourselves or the earth.”
The “I” in “The Bear,” an Eskimo hunter, step by step turns bearlike, search-
ing long sentences past mythic way-stations along the “fairway of the bears”—
all this heard in Kinnell’s husky precise speaking voice.

1

In late winter

I sometimes glimpse bits of steam

coming up from

some fault in the old snow

and bend close to see it is lung-colored

and put down my nose

and know

the chilly, enduring odor of bear.

2

I take wolf ’s rib and whittle

it sharp at both ends

and coil it up

and freeze it in blubber and place it out

on the fairway of the bears.

And when it has vanished

I move out on the bear tracks,