Thoreau and the Snapping Turtle
By David Wagoner
As his boat glided across a flooded meadow,
He saw beneath him under lily pads,
Brown as dead leaves in mud, a yard-long
Snapping turtle staring up through the water
At him, its shell as jagged as old bark.
He plunged his arm in after it to the shoulder,
Stretching and missing, but groping till he caught it
By the last ridge of its tail. Then he held on,
Hauled it over the gunwale, and flopped it writhing
Into the boat. It began gasping for air
Through a huge gray mouth, then suddenly
Heaved its hunchback upward, slammed the thwart
As quick as a spring trap and, thrusting its neck
Forward a foot at a lunge, snapped its beaked jaws
So violently, he only petted it once,
Then flinched away. And all the way to the landing
It hissed and struck, thumping the seat
Under him hard and loud as a stake-driver.
It was so heavy, he had to drag it home,
All thirty pounds of it, wrong side up by the tail.
His neighbors agreed it walked like an elephant,
lilting this way and that, its head held high,
A scarf of ragged skin at its throat. It would sag
Slowly to rest then, out of its element,
Unable to bear its weight in this new world.
Each time he turned it over, it tried to recover
By catching at the floor with its claws, by straining
The arch of its neck, by springing convulsively,
Tail coiling snakelike. But finally it slumped
On its spiky back like an exhausted dragon.
He said he'd seen a cutoff snapper's head
That would still bite at anything held near it
As if the whole of its life were mechanical,
That a heart cut out of one had gone on beating
By itself like clockwork till the following morning.
And the next week he wrote: It is worth the while
To ask ourselves... Is our life innocent
Enough? Do we live inhumanely, toward man
Or beast, in thought or act? To be successful
And serene we must be at one with the universe.
The least conscious and needless injury
Inflicted on any creature is
To its extent a suicide. What peace-
Or life-can a murderer have?... White maple keys
Have begun to fall and float downstream like wings.
There are myriads of shad-flies fluttering
Over the dark still water under the hill.
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Tuesday was a lovely, rather warm day though it started very early for me since the idiot company that cuts down trees, which had blocked off half our parking lot for several days including the entire weekend with cones but without any sort of indication why the spots were reserved, came banging on doors to demand that people move the cars they had parked in those spots after being blocked from them for so many days with no indication whatsoever of any reason via sign or notices under doors. I boxed some books, finished my last batch of scanning, and took a lovely walk to see the peonies and catbirds that are replacing the irises and thrushes.
We ate leftovers for dinner to be quick because Magikarp were spawning for Pokemon Go Spotlight Hour, then immediately afterward I watched Voyager's "Day of Honor" with my Tuesday night usuals (I always try to tell myself it's the Klingon stuff that annoys me about that episode, but let's be real, it's how diminished Torres is in that relationship with Paris where he mansplains and Klingon-splains and even engineer-splains to her; I actually prefer Seven of Nine). Then Paul and I watched Come From Away, which I loved; I'd listened to the songs, but it was a real pleasure to see it staged. Some of the variety of turtles in the canal last weekend:
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