Writing the Land: Wanderings I
Poems “The Hunter, ” “Defiance,” “In Which We May Be Reborn,” and “Oxytocin” by Ryan Kegley · Photography by Ryan Kegley · Writing the Land: Wanderings I · NatureCulture · 2024
The Hunter
You announced your arrival with a raspy squawk
and alighted at the edge of the pond. The sun
was setting, and the air, buoyant for July,
was livelier still with the conversations and carrying-ons
of common yellowthroat, dickcissel, barn and cliff
swallow, American robin, upland sandpiper,
house and song sparrow, all dancing atop
the sonorous bellow of solicitous bullfrogs. You,
more Jurassic than modern, a gangly but graceful
serpent on stilts, noticed neither them nor me
as you stalked your prey. I’ve never seen such patience.
A step. A pause. A tilt of the head. Another step,
more studied than the last. Stealthily you made
your way across the water, each footfall soundless,
rippleless. Twenty minutes to traverse twenty feet.
A step, a pause, a crane of the neck, the crouch.
The interminable wait. Then at last the strike,
so swift and surgical that had I blinked I would
have missed it. Spellbound, I watched once more
before the sun passed beyond the hills, and you
disappeared behind a stand of grasses. I thought,
I should like to be like you, Ardea herodias, treading
lightly, leaving no wake, infinitely patient, my days
as deliberate as each glacial stride made in that pond.
Defiance
for Dunn Ranch Prairie
What happens here is not the stuff of cutting-
edge technologies, of machine learning, of artificial
intelligence, of augmented humans and augmented
analytics and augmented design, of intelligent
spaces and smart places, of blockchains, of natural
language processing, of cloud and edge and quantum
computing, of big data, of machine co-creativity,
of computer vision and facial recognition, of digital
twins and digital platforms and digitally extended
realities, of gene editing, of drones, of chatbots
and robots and cobots, of cybersecurity and cyber
resilience, of micro-moments and mass personalization,
of 4D printing, additive manufacturing, the new
space race or the Internet of Things, but a simple act
of defiance: stewarding the present into the future
by honoring the past.
In Which We May Be Reborn
Daybreak, lately punctuated with cumulonimbus
only Davis could paint, has turned to Richter’s panes
of monochrome gray. Rain is in the air, pregnant
and cool and damp, more spring than high summer.
In this living landscape of virgin prairie, in the midst
of American buffalo, Bison bison bison, returned
to their sacred calling, I am witness to deep time.
I see the wild plains, unfenced and unfettered, grasses
stretching as far as the eye can see, bison teeming
in their thousands, in their tens of thousands
and with them the Báxoje, traditional caretakers
of these ancestral lands. Eyes closed, I hear Dodge’s call,
Kill every buffalo you can! Every buffalo dead is
an Indian gone. I sat in the utterness of those words,
the soft grass of my heart weeping for what might
have been. At last, thunder rolls thick and strong,
winds snapping to attention, the sturdy rains washing
over the land, over bird and butterfly and milkweed,
over deer and coyote and bison, over the forgotten,
over the fallen and the dispossessed, over the sins of our
grandfathers’ grandfathers’ grandfathers.
Oxytocin
You are not in the middle of nowhere. Here, in the Grand
River Grasslands of northern Missouri, the landscape looks
like so much drive-by land—something full of nothing
on your way to somewhere else. Stay awhile. If you’re
unaccustomed, the first minute can be uncomfortable.
Relax. Find a spot on the ground. Sit. Five minutes
can feel formidable. Where is my phone? Am I missing
out? Does someone need me? Breathe. Feel the air fill
your lungs, deeper and more fully than you’ve ever felt.
Feel the release that comes in the exhale. Let go. Surrender
your impulse to action. After ten minutes, a clarity takes
hold, the clutter and clatter of the everyday evaporating
like valley fog on a summer morning. There is nothing
but you, outside your body, beyond the self, in this place,
this nowhere, this everywhere, this prairie that is emptiness
and fullness altogether. Synthesis and antithesis.
After thirty minutes, you can’t imagine going back:
Indiangrass and bluestem rustling in the breeze, the damp
patter of rain from an incoming storm, the immediate
and all-encompassing drone of cicadas and with it the chirps
of cricket and trills of katydid, and the birds, first crow,
biggest and loudest, followed by bellicose jay, then bunting,
too, with his lively song of what! what! where? where?
see it! see it! and whip-poor-will’s namesake refrain,
emphatic and endless, the dazzling colors of blazing star,
gentian, aster and sunflower, lake upon sea upon ocean
of sunflower, the panoramic grandeur of bison browsing
before you, the rich smell of humus, mystical and physiological,
human and humane, from and of the earth, bonds lover
to loved, child to mother, you to mother earth: Your once-
coarse senses awakened and alive to the once-foreign world
around you. Stay as long as you can. Hold that other
world at bay, if only a little longer. When you go, carry this
moment with you, this time spent here in this somewhere,
in this place that is no longer nowhere. Hold it, real
and vital and necessary, as you hold love, as you hold truth,
as you hold all the days of your life.