The next poem is called "Keeping Watch."
And it was a memory of having stood
in a friend's backyard in Oregon just
as the sun was going down and being amazed
by the profusion of small life.
Oregon has slugs all over the ground.
It's a very strange experience if you've never seen it before.
This isn't in the poem but I think what triggered it,
it does--
I was thinking of someone else from Oregon apparently
had told me that when they were little kids,
they used to light slugs on fire.
Because they do something horrible like sizzle
or something, which was an awful thing.
But somehow it got me into a mood
for the way life consumes itself.
"Keeping Watch."
In his backyard, he preserves the smallest reminders
of his nakedness, his private white belly crawling
with roaches without faces or any apparent purpose.
Slugs with their own version of darkness corrupting the grass.
And that twilight, he will watch them
as if he were God, the butcher without hands to flay his beef.
The landlord who was always elsewhere
with the food in his back pocket.
Now and then something comes over him, disbelief.
Termites crawl out of tiny eggs and without hesitation,
learn the proper moves, the retreats
into tunnels and routes, eat the marvelous wood
and the rainwater will flush them like cells
through clogged veins.
They drown right in front of his eyes.
Each thing eats the thing smaller
without remorse or punishment.
This is what he's been told to keep quiet about.
One night the air will break like glass,
he will step through like a scar the healing messenger,
the angel of insects who has lost his way.
And what will he do?
Meanwhile, he will not accept and sleep or deep in his wife's
eyes, tell anyone of the dense ripening horror,
like an egg inside him under the thickening skin,
tell them that this is all there is.