I pass through them as they pass through me taking and leaving
affections, seeds, skeletons,
40 millennia of fossil records of insects that do not last a day,
body-prints of mayflies, a legend half-heard 45 in a train
of the half-man searching for an ever-fleeing other half1
through Muharram tigers,2 50 hyacinths in crocodile waters, and the sweet
twisted lives of epileptic saints,
1. In an essay Ramanujan compares the Hindu 2. During the first month of the Islamic calendar, myth of the god that 'splits himself into male and Muharram processions, often including dancers in female' to 'the androgynous figure in Plato's Sym-tiger masks, commemorate the martyrdom of posium, halved into male and female segments Muhammad's grandson, Husein. which forever seek each other and crave union.'
.
FOUNDLINGS IN THE YUKON / 258 1
and even as I add, I lose, decompose 55 into my elements,
into other names and forms, past, and passing, tenses without time,
caterpillar on a leaf, eating, 60 being eaten.3
1986
Foundlings in the Yukon
In the Yukon1 the other day miners found the skeleton of a lemming curled around some seeds
5 in a burrow: sealed off by a landslide in Pleistocene times.0 the Great Ice Age
Six grains were whole,
unbroken: picked and planted
io ten thousand years after their time, they took root within forty-eight hours and sprouted
15 a candelabra of eight small leaves.
A modern Alaskan lupine,0 a wildflower I'm told, waits three years to come to flower, but these upstarts drank up sun
20 and unfurled early with the crocuses of Marc h as if long deep burial had made them hasty
for birth and season, for names,
25 genes, for passing on: like the kick and shift of an intra-uterine memory, like
3. According to a poem in the ancient Sanskrit Western' Classics'). Taittiriya Upanishad, 'What eats is eaten, / and 1. Mountainous territory in northwestern Can- what's eaten, eats / in turn' (Ramanujan's trans-ada. lation, in his essay 'Some Thoughts on 'Non
.
2582 / THOM GUNN
this morning's dream of being
30 born in an eagle's
nest with speckled eggs and the screech
of nestlings, like a pent-up
centenarian's sudden burst
of lust, or maybe
35 just elegies in Duino 2 unbound
from the dark,
these new aborigines biding
their time
for the miner's night-light
40 to bring them their dawn,
these infants compact with age,
older than the oldest
things alive, having skipped
a million falls
45 and the registry of tree-rings,
suddenly younger
