Drone of wind and stream,
a bird whistles a hot riff,
squirrels chatter rhythm.
Rusty, walking in the woods alone
on the hill across the creek, coming back
from his favorite huckleberry patch,
says he saw, at the bottom of a ravine,
a mother mountain lion and two cubs.
He comes home out of breath from running.
I ask for every detail he can give.
He says he won’t go over there again,
but it’s no safer right outside the fence.
Our house and yard are in her hunting range.
Month after month, cats disappear,
scared away or eaten, we don’t know.
Something big is growling in the night
down the hill toward the creek.
I’m growling back and banging on the wall.
Ella says she saw a mountain lion
across the road from where she parks her car.
Rusty says he saw the lion again
across the footbridge right outside the fence.
Sometimes we see quiet groups of deer
and a noisy flock of turkeys near the house.
Other times the woods are empty silence.
I think this is when the lion’s nearby.
She’s hunting them. They’re avoiding her.
Below this pastoral farmland are cliffs,
awe inspiring, pierced by wave-cut holes,
each one named— the little Porte d’Amont,
a small round hole, just a spot of blue paint
under this pale elephant hump of rock;
the Porte d’Aval, its outer leg of chalk
like a tall cathedral’s flying buttress—
Monet made many paintings of this arch,
with storm waves or mirrored sunsets,
blurred by rain, or bright by morning sun—
and hard to reach but huge, the Manneporte,
sculpted in bold impastos of paint,
each brushstroke twice the size of the figures
standing on a low ledge of rock behind
sudden impact of white on blue and dark.
Here’s another view, rust-stained chalk,
a bit of greenery growing over the edge,
blue reflection, shadow, rippled glass sea,
puffs of salmon cloud, distant haze.
Look at this, there is no other world,
nothing real but geologic time.
A raw pain underneath my sternum,
I know what this must be; I’ve had warning.
Forget the car’s rear end, the propane tanks.
I need to get to town fast and calm.
An ambulance would take too long, get lost
looking for me on this winding road.
Stay calm, keep going, stay calm, keep going,
here at last, turn around, and park.
“Heart attack, stroke, something like that,” I gasp.
I’m surrounded like a queen bee by workers,
lying down, tasting nitroglycerin,
smelling pure oxygen, but I can’t breathe.
While my fingers, arms, and legs go numb, they ask,
“On a scale of one to ten, how bad’s the pain?”
I vaguely recall the helicopter ride,
trying to sign papers floating over me.
Here I am, oblivious on morphine,
an intravenous fluid in each hand,
an automated blood pressure taker
squeezing my arm like an anaconda,
a two foot soda straw from groin to heart,
my back in constant pain but I can’t move.
Because this tube is in an artery,
and I’ve had enough anticoagulants
to go halfway to hemophilia,
I can’t do anything that could cause bleeding.
I’m in the room next to the nursing station,
where they talk, and talk, and talk, all night long.
copyright © 2005 Carl Miller
These events happened May - August 2001, the heart attack on August 15. I’m not sure how close “Claude Monet at Etretat” came to being my last poem.