The Tree Snail and the Ohia: A Study of Interdependencies
Surfing waves of color, the fire of flowering
that spreads from tree to tree across the valley
up the mountain side and to the ridge,
a cresting brilliance, lip of leaping flame
of the ohia in bloom, the honeycreepers
ride and weave among the overstory leaves,
lush, leafy fold to the creeping tree snail,
or forest jewel, of appetite so fine,
or even finicky, he will not harm
one leaf of his foliate host but feeds
rather on fungus that otherwise turns
to blight and kills the blooms the small birds feed on,
and without which, like tiny forest lights,
they twitch and chitter, flicker and go out.
At the Sewanee Inn Talking with Bob Hass About Eco-Poetics
From the coffee table, with its scattering of biscuit crumbs,
Bob lifted a single sheet of my manuscript and leaned back
in his patio chair, quietly scanning the lines with his eyes
that seemed to move tactilely over each word and phrase,
like fingers over a line of braille, when, he spotted on the page
with my poem on it a small brown ant doodling on the margins.
“Where did you come from?” Bob asked, as if querying
a child too lost in his own adventure to know he is lost.
I listened for the answer, but the ant, too busy to be disturbed,
continued with his inscrutable marginalia, looking
for all his weaving and looping like an errant semicolon
forlornly searching for a home, which, sadly, he could not find
in my poem since I’d picked up in my college writing classes
in the ’90s—with their emphatic preference for bald statement,
punchy lines and muscular prose—a gruff Anglo-Saxon
and, frankly anti-francophone, prejudice against that mark
of punctuation (its suspended play with similarity and difference
balanced on the fulcrum of judgement or the elegantly deferred
pronouncement, first drifted as the pollen of thought, over
a break in the breath of the inner voice pausing to revisit, extend
or amend a phrase, or repeat it in a finer tone so that it acquires,
almost as afterthought, the fructuous heft of the definitive),
which blunt proclivity in that moment I regretted, now wanting
him to find a place where he could burrow down and rest, if even
for a breath. But, no, he continued his meandering, having found
no place for himself in my poem, and was now working his way
down the page, so Bob, seeing where he was headed, gently moved
the sheet with my poem on it so that its bottom right corner touched
the arm rest of his chair, which the ant stepped down onto, leaving
the page and poem behind as he went on probing and searching,
with fitful starts, reverses and changes of direction, his little feelers
fluttering soundlessly, as Bob continued tracking the ant—its unspooling line
of thought—interjecting short comments on the fine intelligence at work
where my eyes saw only scribbles,
“Looking for scent… can’t find it… moving on.”
Derek N. Otsuji lives and writes on the southern shore of Oahu. He is the author of The Kitchen of Small Hours, winner of the 2021 Crab Orchard Review Poetry Series Open Competition, publishing fall 2021. His poems have appeared in Poet Lore, Rattle, Pleiades, Sycamore Review, and The Threepenny Review.
Header photo of honeycreeper by vagabond54, courtesy Shutterstock.
