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