Darwin, on Patagonia's Shore

Philip W. Walsh

For Max

fleeing schoolrooms and dorm rooms full of mumbled Greek and Latin 

and, at home,

his father's stare 

his sisters' rules

Charley scrambled over down 

and up and down riverbank

and seashore

seeking birds' eggs

stones

seashells

fruit from his father's orchard

partridge 

and grouse in season

and 

beetles

                                                                                           beetles

                                                                                                beetles 

beetles he placed into boxes and labelled in 

straight disordered lines

until

seasick, pitching and heaving on the Atlantic's swells,

his cramped and damp cabin expanding to hold Lyell's principles of slow time, the earth's several hundred million years,

rollers slapping the hull, driving him toward Patagonia

where, scrambling over cliff faces exposed by wind and water,

he unburies, with pick and chisel, the Pleistocene's ancient denizens, extinct some ten or twelve millennia

Megatherium

Toxodon

Glyptodon

Macrauchenia.

Years later, back on the English downs, he hears Patagonia's rushing and retreating waves

     feels them flooding his old wonder cabinets full of birds’ eggs, seashells, and 

beetles

watering his tree of life

from which he hangs

apes

finches iguanas

earthworms barnacles

orchids sundews

infusoria rhizopods foraminifera

   rooted in 

rising from

   remaking

 the tangled shore of his mind


The Science

My poem portrays Darwin's mind developing from that of a child, chasing creatures across southern England, to one which could see their places on a tree of life of his own design.


The Poet

Dr. Philip W. Walsh teaches for the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies and Liberal Studies at California State University, Northridge. He is currently writing In the Beginning, All the World Was America: An Ecocritical History of the Literatures of the Western Hemisphere, 1491 to the Present, under contract with Lexington Books, Rowman & Littlefield. In his free time, he hikes, writes haiku, raises insectivorous plants and protozoa, and spends time in his garden with his family. 


Next poem: Geomagnetic Reversal by Suzanna Fitzpatrick