Oat stalks hang their oat-heavy heads.Panic grass shakes in the windoff a goldfinch’s wing. Cause,                                                                  effect, and cause.Drone, like the bee, of goldenrod and aster,tool of the stick-tight and cockleburr,I park and wade into high riverside grasses.A dog gnaws on a box turtle, a spider ridesa floating log, straining the air of its midges and leafbits.A fisherman lazy as late summer current,                                                                                           casts, reels, and casts.It occurs to me I am alive, which is to sayI won’t be soon. Robinson Jeffersfrom Carmel Point, in “an unbroken field of poppy and lupin”ashamed of us all (of himself ), took solace in time,in salt, water, and rock, in knowingall things human “will ebb, and all/                                                                             Their works dissolve.”Me, too. And I’m not always so patient. I’ve caught myselfwishing our spoiler species gone, just swept away,returned to rust and compost for more deserving earthly forms.Meanwhile, flint arrowheads turn up among the plasticpicnic sporks, the glacial crags and bottom silt.Hawks roost across the river on the now defunct                                                                                                           nuclear power plant cooling tower,flotsam left at the human high water mark.Like mussel shells, like driftwood or seedpod,like the current’s corrugations in the sand.Here, on this side, a woodchuck sits up, lustrous,fat on her chestnut haunches, (she thinks herselfqueen of her narrow realm) and munches                                                                                              the fisherman’s crust.Who wouldn’t smile? Who doesn’t pity—and love—the woodchuck not only despite but for her like-human smugness?How can I not through her intercession forgive                                                                                                        for now a few things human.