She Wanted a Nature Valentine Poem

Porcupine and Eagle

The lumbering, quill-studded quadruped
waddles the shy, long way round,
ascends the camas desert tree.
Midwinter sap calls it up and out.
Clumsy, it does not think:
If I fall I could stab myself.
But it is true. True as the green sky:
where afternoon blue meets sun sinking
orange.
And the bald eagle sits,
taking it in on his thick branch,
sees his prickly neighbor shinny almost
to the very crown of the tree, backlit
quills casting an aura of abundance, defense.
The eagle’s sharp parts—talon, beak— not protective
but tools to pluck the trout like a God
unannounced, and rip its guts into dinner.
That was earlier. Now it perches here
away from chirping convocation and cavorting
peers. Why does it not fly to them,
apparently content to keep the company
of the sap-sucking, bud-nibbling, arrow-furred
beast? Not even a truce. It’s not like that.
This pause in their respective peregrinations
just finds each free—sharing for an hour—light, air, and tree.

--Scott Samuelson
February 14, 2011

For Shauna