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After the Beagle



In July opened first notebook on Transmutation of Species--Had been greatly struck . . . on character of South American fossils and species on Galápagos archipelago. These facts (especially latter) origin of all my views. -Darwin's notebooks

At first, the awaiting: we stood in to anchor.
Davits rattled, the tender put out,
and the islanders, who victual ships that stop,
met us ashore: a place hotter, more regular or bare



was never stamped from a mill. Later,
I remembered the foundries at Wolverhampton,
sweating, measured the heat of the sand--
137, then off the thermometer.



I'd work up my notes, aiming, amid tedium
and cactuses, for accuracy. Tiredness
drained from each stone I touched,
from vitreous to fevered. Days glowed,



and I cured like a ham. Volcanoes,
ash and tuff-craters: the underground
was the aboveground. Shades of Enna:
one stepped from the ship to find other stars,



the grit of millennia. One night I climbed
to a small promontory, and saw the whole
spread out moonlit and knobbed; by a stunted grove,
two dinners being decided, lizard and islander.



____




So what was the point to the whole scheme,
unless a certain wideness
reclaimed some of the bareness,
if none were exempt from tooth-and-claw theme?



I watched two cranes lift into flight, their care
their brood. For fostering of young, read taupe-
and-grey mechanics. Wind out of thickets bore seeds
brought to the islands over centuries,



who could say, and yet the intrigue, sheer numbers
of the enterprise! I watched sailors forage,
and knew that in a day a frigate's crew
might take two hundred tortoises



for sport and food. In the mountains, with a breeze,
I was better. The tracks of the tortoises,
moving from the lowlands to high pools,
could have carried a furniture waggon.



I tallied them as they scraped up the slopes,
noting one's back scrawled on, that traveling canteen
which when split provides drink. And have counted
when embarking sailors gathered



what to them were motile stones,
ballast or curios,
piled ten-deep in the hold;
who have waited out the airless voyage



in my own house, a child dead, and thought
again of reckoning, and of weight and vast calm;
of our etuis, snuffboxes, combs and eyeglass rims,
how they shall piece us out.

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