Squirrells

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.