Thursday Short Poem: Hutton’s “On the Vanishing…”

This Susan Hutton poem bears reading out loud, preferably more than once. It’s especially good for those of us who call ourselves historians to ponder.

On the Vanishing of Large Creatures

I don’t think the Mayflower’s passengers boarded
with any inkling they would be revered.
We imagine their journey with clean sails and blue sky,
and the galley was probably filthy.
Meriwether Lewis finally reached the Pacific
after writing those dutiful descriptions of routes
and rivers and new species, and just carved his name
in a tree. Michelangelo, painting the Sistine Chapel,
eventually finished and went home.
But that fervor must be somewhere.
As when the music finishes and floats off into the air.
As when Stevens walked to work writing poems in his head,
and when he got there let that private part of his mind keep going,
Van Gogh kept painting himself in the asylum
because he was the only model he had.
Oh, the spring river moves around the ice
and the floes chime out their ruin,
taking with them the shape of the winter banks
and the stones sloping down toward the bed.
In bed the body’s glorious grasp of its anatomy
will move off with its pleasure, and the shape of the bones,
the muscles and tendons must all be relearned.
No one remembers when it happened,
but we were anchored to the earth in the time it took
to draw water, hand over hand, up from the well.
The stone wall stood unassisted all those years,
and the oceans were once filled with giant creatures
the fishermen stripped from the sea.