The Poet on niche as the ecosystem's poem

Nothing lives in the open. Not even the open.

What lives, lives in the shape something else left, leaving — the hawk’s long shadow taught the vole its hour; the vole’s hour taught the owl.

Every doorway is cut to the height of someone not yet arrived.

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Old ground is heavy. Listen how it doesn’t echo.

Ten thousand seasons of one thing pressing on another thing until the pressure had a name and the name had a mouth and the mouth had a schedule.

A young field rings when you strike it. That isn’t health. That’s nobody home yet.

—

The line asked for one word, and the word was

and nothing else fits the socket.

For a long time the sentence keeps the exact shape of its missing — a mouth still open on what it was about to say.

That silence is not empty. It is diagnostic. Put your ear there.

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The alarm is easy. Everyone hears the alarm.

Learn instead the sound of widening: the particular going soft at its edges, three calls becoming one call becoming weather.

A dying forest does not scream. It rhymes more. It rhymes more and more until it rhymes with anything.

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So tend the slow.

Let the same thing happen in the same place longer than seems reasonable, until the place has a grip on it.

Don’t compost what’s still burning. Don’t mulch the line before it’s been said aloud enough times to leave a hollow when it goes.

Ask of any ground, any language, any life — is it becoming more like itself, or more like everywhere?