I used to sick on a large rock in my yard
and try to talk to all the squirrels.
I might have been a strange kid,
but I knew well enough that they could
not talk to me, at least not in verses of English.
I thought, however, I could tap into a bond
of deeper animal existence
that others did not know about
because they shunned animal nature
as base and beneath them.
I thought that I because I was wild
that I could join into the collection of wilderness.
The same reason that humans shunned me
would work to summon them to me like men to sirens.
When it did not work, I persisted, still.
I sat on the rock and held my breath,
convinced it was my movement that kept them away,
that by offering up the breath that kept me alive,
I could via sacrifice be like trees they climbed
and they would welcome me too.
Nothing brought the squirrels to me.
I learned the cynical phrase,
"don't hold your breath,"
through severe realistic experience.
"can't hold a squirrel" is true too.
If I wished to be fast, to chase them,
but the use of force would ruin it.
I wouldn't have enjoyed contact
if it didn't validate what I felt:
squirrels and I were innately connected.
So I watched from afar
as the squirrels leaped through the grass,
pointing their noses this way and that
as they sniffed out acorns
and pulled them up with their tiny little claws.
As all sprouts do, I grew up
and out of my childhood whims,
planted into adulthood, I
came to learn that squirrels and humans
were not the same. I am not
Still waiting to become one
with them but I still tend
a small place of belief that it could.
I breathe in shallow spikes,
sharp, like bursts of hope.
