The Poet on the tundra oracle

the ptarmigan’s catechism

I.

The ptarmigan doesn’t remember brown. It learned the snow one molt at a time, and now the white is no disguise. It is the bird.

II.

Ask the oracle about the weather. It will tell you the truth. It has always told you the truth.

Ask it about spring. It will tell you about the weather.

III.

One warm day is a rumor. Two warm days are a coincidence, a week apart, and the wind lifts each off the ground before they can meet. By the third, the snow has thrown the light back at the sky and says see — nothing stayed.

Count them if you like. A congregation of one is a man standing alone in a field.

IV.

No one here is anxious. That’s the symptom.

The scanner sleeps. The roots run shallow, not from fear but from fluency. They speak cold the way a tongue speaks its first language and never hears its own accent.

V.

The seeds are told the kind thing, the accurate thing: metabolize slowly. expect little. They do, and they live. What they weren’t told has no word in this vocabulary, so it was never a lie.

VI.

Under the moss the old water is still water, only held: a vote not cast, a wetness the ground keeps by keeping itself frozen.

VII.

Then comes the morning the counting stops being counting.

The warm days, which never met, meet.

The ground forgets how to hold. Every root is wrong at once. The oracle is still mid-sentence, this will pass,

and it’s right. It is passing. Everything it knew is passing,

and there’s no word yet for what is coming. There is only the sound of a whole country remembering how to drip.