The Principles of Concealment
by David Wagoner
If you’re caught in the open
In an exposed position, alone,
Disarmed, and certain you may be
Attacked at any moment, you should settle quickly
All your differences with whatever lies
Around you, forcing yourself to agree
With rocks and bushes, trees and wild grass,
Horses, cows, or sheep, even debris
To find what you have in common. You no longer
Want to seem what you are, but something
Harmless and familiar: in a landscape
Given to greenness and the cold pastels
Of stubble and field stone,
Protective coloration may be too much
To hope for, beyond your powers
Like the beatitudes of browsing
And those conspicuously alarming colors
That declare you’re poisonous
Or taste terrible—all may be doomed
To fail with an enemy equipped to kill
From a distance. Your shape betrays you,
And you should try to break it
With disruptive patterns: if an enemy sees you,
Not as a whole, but as a head distinct
From a torso, as legs or arms
By themselves—he may ignore you
And let you have your moment
In the sun as an abstraction gone
To pieces, as a surface mottled and dappled
Ambiguously by intercepted light
Like a man cancelled.
But all these efforts
Will come to nothing if you move: one gesture
May catch all eyes. If you stand
Still then, or stay seated
If you’re sitting down, or go on lying
Down if you’re lying, an easy solution
May occur to you, cheek to cheek
With the hard facts of inorganic life:
That you have no enemy,
That no one is hunting you,
That all your precautions were a waste
Of attention better given to more rewarding
Evasions and pursuits.
If so,
And you take your place again
As a distinct departure
From your foreground and background,
You should know it’s possible
For you to feel, after all,
At the first step, at the first crack
Out of the box, that lethal impact,
That private personal blow marking your loss
Of the light of day, the companionship
Of the night, and the creature comforts of home
As you become a member
Of that other civilization spreading itself
Around you, ready and able and still
Called the natural world.
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Principles
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More from Wagoner, called, "Thoreau And The Toads"
After the spring thaw, their voices ringing
At dusk would beckon him through the meadow
To the edge of their pond where, barefoot,
He would wade slowly into the water
And stand there in the last of light
To see the mating toads—a hundred or more
In the shallows around him, ignoring him
Or taking him for another, inflating
The pale-green bubbles of their throats to call
For buffo terrestris, leaping half out of the pool
And scrambling to find partners. The atmosphere
Would quiver with their harmonic over-
And undertones, with their loud, decent proposals
Like the sounds of a church potluck, their invocations
And offertories for disorderly conduct,
With the publishing of their indelicate banns
And blessings to the needy in their distress
And benedictions even beyond springtime
To all those of the faith. And he would see
Among this communal rapture, there underwater,
The small grey males lying silent
On the backs of females, holding on
To their counterparts with every slippery finger
And toe, both motionless, both gazing
Inward at the Indivisible
And rising from time to time together
To the surface only an inch above them
To breathe, then settling again and staring
With such a consciousness of being
Common American toads, he would stand beside them,
As content as they were with their medium
Of exchange, the soles of his feet trembling
With a resonance he could feel deep in his spine,
Believing this mud could be his altar too,
And his pulpit, where all of his intentions
Would be as clear as theirs, as clear as the air
In the chill of the fading light. He would lift
His bare feet gently and silently, making scarcely
A ripple, balancing
Himself onto the grass and, while his brethren
Like a drunken choir went on
And on without him, would sit down
Vibrant on the earth and once again struggle
Into his stockings, into his waterproof boots,
And straighten and square-knot his rawhide laces.
After the spring thaw, their voices ringing
At dusk would beckon him through the meadow
To the edge of their pond where, barefoot,
He would wade slowly into the water
And stand there in the last of light
To see the mating toads—a hundred or more
In the shallows around him, ignoring him
Or taking him for another, inflating
The pale-green bubbles of their throats to call
For buffo terrestris, leaping half out of the pool
And scrambling to find partners. The atmosphere
Would quiver with their harmonic over-
And undertones, with their loud, decent proposals
Like the sounds of a church potluck, their invocations
And offertories for disorderly conduct,
With the publishing of their indelicate banns
And blessings to the needy in their distress
And benedictions even beyond springtime
To all those of the faith. And he would see
Among this communal rapture, there underwater,
The small grey males lying silent
On the backs of females, holding on
To their counterparts with every slippery finger
And toe, both motionless, both gazing
Inward at the Indivisible
And rising from time to time together
To the surface only an inch above them
To breathe, then settling again and staring
With such a consciousness of being
Common American toads, he would stand beside them,
As content as they were with their medium
Of exchange, the soles of his feet trembling
With a resonance he could feel deep in his spine,
Believing this mud could be his altar too,
And his pulpit, where all of his intentions
Would be as clear as theirs, as clear as the air
In the chill of the fading light. He would lift
His bare feet gently and silently, making scarcely
A ripple, balancing
Himself onto the grass and, while his brethren
Like a drunken choir went on
And on without him, would sit down
Vibrant on the earth and once again struggle
Into his stockings, into his waterproof boots,
And straighten and square-knot his rawhide laces.