The Venus Flytrap (Dionaea Muscipula)
for Phoebe Judge
Everything is hungry,
And the radius of
Viability is
Closing. Sixty miles,
For now. Inside the Green
Swamp Preserve, longleaf pine
Trees stake down the savannah.
Underbrush in need of
Fire and balanced economies.
Venus flytraps were full of
Spiders. Arthur Dobbs called
Them “Iron-spring fox traps”
In the first recorded
Naming. Poached and packed in
Egg cartons, sold for a dime
By the thousands to feed
A bogus cure for cancer.
Everything is hungry.
We found, perhaps, one small
Bud along the trail. Ten
Years ago, the floor was covered
With enough to eat you
Alive, if they were so
Inclined. Are we worth eating
All of them? We name and
Call it ours. Oh mother
Of beauty, have we not yet
Multiplied enough?
* * * * *
National Park
Big Woods: 1,563mi2. Straddling a portion of the original sites
of Yosemite National Park and Sierra National Forest.
People vacation here for the oxygen. To stimulate the green receptors in their eyes. The lottery, if you’re lucky, lets you visit once, and then only for one day. The queue to enter is years’ long.
I went to find the Jesus of the bears because if he is anywhere, he’s here — this warehouse of our nicest things. The only patch attrition left to us.
His ursine siblings stripped him of his claws and forced him over the falls. He rose again from the rainbow and the foam, sharper than ever to terrorize the fish and the berry, at least within these few cordoned miles.
Green is a wavelength so rare now as to be the voice of God that no one hears anymore. I want an animal savior, want to slough humanity like a fur coat from my shoulders.
Was it sacrifice for us to mechanize the country but this solitary place?
Here is the basket, here are the eggs. Walled for its protection. But the fires glom more and more, and the barricades won’t hold. Computers scrub the air, but our thinking was always an upside-down parasol. We planned for the worst we could think of and that was our mistake, because we aren’t very bright. There is so much worse we can’t think of.
Perhaps my god should have been a sequoia. The fire bursts its cones and phoenixes new life. Whose forgiveness should we seek but that of the earth we ask to accept us when we die?