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Bee Bee Bee Green Rosella Eastern Quoll Eastern Quoll Eastern Quoll Green Rosella Koala Bee Turtle swan

Clade Song 16

 

Robin Song

Anticipating with one’s whole force      the swinging of the door:

how the robins rediscover the tree of heaven     the sumac in our postage-stamp

yard while the lawn is still gray      and bloodless. They announce

an arrival with the disappearance     of a thousand fermented

charms we hardly noticed.       How does one make something out

of thin air? Such invention       resembles an odd pulse of the sun.

I lean against our old Jeep with balding tires     in the road that has driven us

almost eight times the circumference of this earth    and listen to the birds.

 

 
Goanna snow skink Goanna darter slug coyote

Nick Neely is the author of the essay collection Coast Range, a finalist for the John Burroughs Medal for natural history writing, and the travelogue Alta California, an LA Times Bestseller that details his twelve-week trek from San Diego to San Francisco to retrace the first overland Spanish expedition through that territory. He is a recipient of PEN Northwest’s Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency, a UC Berkeley–11th Hour Food and Farming Journalism Fellowship, and an AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award. His work is published in magazines such as Orion, Mother Jones, Kenyon Review, The Threepenny Review, The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, Harvard Review, Fourth Genre, FIELD, Ninth Letter, Ecotone, and River Teeth. He teaches at Eastern Oregon University and directs its low-res MFA program in creative writing with a special concentration in Landscape, Ecology, and Community.