The Wild
My mother lives in a little yellow cottage
that rests in the tall shadow of
Grandfather Mountain. At night,
she smears peanut butter onto pine cones
and sets them out on the porch,
leaving them for the bears
the way children leave cookies for
Santa Claus on Christmas Eve.
My mother knows that this is a silly
(some say foolish) thing to do, but she
will not be told. Something in her
always longs for more Wild. So she
stands barefoot in her flannel nightgown
on her snow-covered stoop
and calls it to her door. Leaves
the windows open as she sleeps—even in
the February chill—and this is how
I learned.
How I learned to hold my chest wide, an open
invitation. How to be a refuge
for all wandering and hungry and sometimes
wounded, sometimes dangerous
things—
……… Once, I pulled a screaming
……… baby bunny from the clamped jaws
……… of a stray cat—
……… (and didn’t I get scratched?)
……… and didn’t I sit up all night
……… holding it under a lamp
……… dabbing warm goat’s milk into
……… its little mouth?
……… And didn’t I feel the chill, too,
……… when its tongue grew cold
……… beneath my fingers? When
……… its body became still (so still)
……… and the little house I built for it
……… suddenly turned into a casket?
……… And how many times?
How many times did we bring our feral finds
home—The cats? The dogs? The raccoons
whose mothers someone had squashed in the road?
And didn’t we love them? And didn’t they teach us
that loving meant
…………………. …. allowing space?
And didn’t we learn not to reach or clasp
or clamp, but to drop our hands to our sides,
open cups? To pretend cool indifference
when they finally came and pressed
their wet noses into our palms—
They taught us:
……… never jump at love, or else
……… you’ll scare it away.
So it only makes sense then
that when I met a coyote
of a man along the road, I
invited him back home. And
this is what I said to him:
………. come in,
help yourself to everything you want.
…………………… stay a while!
….…. or don’t—
……. (but underneath my breath
….… this is what I prayed:
God, make my heart
an
unclenched
.fist—
let me be
an open
cup—but
please God,
make him
drink.)
How
many times?
Too many
times.
Because this
is the lesson I always choose to forget:
you can make an untamed thing
want you, even
trust you,
even
love you, but
you cannot make him
stay
by Sarah Wheeler
—from Rattle #72, Summer 2021
Tribute to Appalachian Poets