118POETRY AS FIELD GUIDEof it. One thing that seems real about the existence of a species is that its
members recognize each other—that they have a sense of themselves,
their shared world. Species are a community of interpreters, individu-
als who share a system of semiotics, and poetry is one of the processes
we use to approach and decipher the species’ always hidden sense of
itself. Species poems are a pathway into this system and attempts to
share what are provisional translations of that umwelt. Finally, the spe-
cies poem is also an elaboration of naming, at once a limited acknowl-
edgment and an honoring, even if, as Muldoon says in “Hedgehog,” we
define the species as that which “shares its secret with no one. / We say,
Hedgehog, come out / Of yourself and we will love you.”^59