Triptych: Against Moderation

Where the buck took a hunter’s bullet & lay down in the laurel, a dozen chipmunks are calling in unison – mallets on a xylophone all striking the same, middle bar. Too much moderation seems a dangerous thing.

We are only ever saved by what exceeds us. When old fields fall to subdivisions, the kinds of thoughts that need an unbroken span of sky vanish along with the hiccup of the Henslow’s sparrow, the wind in the grass. A few house lots hazarded in the forest & the wolves begin to forget how to lope, halt in the middle of a howl –

a freight train wailing through the gap two hundred years later. All it lacks is the shiver – such a small thing. It hardly seems reasonable to demand the return of thousands of acres of wildness just for that.

We sit at the crossing, engine idling. On the next to last boxcar, neat black letters spell out an immoderate & wholly inarguable projection: NATURE WILL WIN. Then the flashing orange light receding into the distance.

If you pray, pray for the physicians who cannot heal themselves. Pray for the shaman to remove poison everywhere he presses his mouth. On the loading dock behind the hospital, the same cherry has been burning at the end of one cigarette or another for hours now. Each new arrival joins the huddle hurriedly, as if to confer over some desperate case, bending pursed lips as close as necessary to suck a spark from the middle of a column of ash.