Firsts for Late Bloomers

Firsts for Late Bloomers

I keep lists like these. 

Rarities, some. First pronghorn, first peccary,

first ptarmigan.  First pyrrhuloxia, tarantula, wapiti.

Peregrine falcon at age twenty, on the Tappan Zee. 

I’d just learned to swim in a muddy pond, and one falcon,

beam-perched above water, was enough to sweep me

higher?  Hummingbird: fifteen.  Barely glimpsed whirr and rise.  Self-doubt

habitual, not eyesight questionable, makes for such practiced uncertainty.

Bear: twenty-nine.  Four days on Minnesota lakes, we’d seen all else:

marten, moose, eagle, loon.  Then it ran –in daylight pale and frayed –

across the only road  to the end of land.  The rest of earth could not compare

with its blackness – rounded berry, thrown obsidian, thunbergia throat.

I think of near misses.  Do I count the shadow-wolf

that might have been a boulder though gone at our return? 

Sixteen: bear, while I sat unaware by the daybreak lake and it snuffed my tent

behind.  The boys’ shouts not a third day of tricks.

Peregrine across the hood of the car; me twelve, shoelace-staring, testing silence, coming

home from Easter Mass.   My brother hit the brakes and, gleeful, swore. 

The brother I don’t talk to anymore.

I keep quiet lists like these:  First pull towards girls the opposite of me.

Fourteen? Twenty-four? Nine? First kiss: eighteen, no tongue.

He didn’t put his hands anywhere. First tampon, thirty. First and last push

against hard chest, twenty. First soft sweetness mine, and hers, twenty-eight.

First heart-stopping wish for no end.

First communion, first reconciliation, need for confirmation,

stamp of approval from on high and subsequent,

inevitable fall from grace.  When is the soul first accordingly marked with sin? 

First fistfight, first no, first cigarette.  First repetition of the Kinsey scale,

down to zero and back again. Like the hummingbird that never alights,

I didn’t know what I would look like at rest.

First touch of things darker than bear pelt.

Two winters in a row along the coast, a search for snowy owls to prevent

my mind from making a roost out of the day of burial, of frozen snow.

Not even during an irruption year could I find a single one

in the eye-watering cold despite insistent need.  I will tell you

this is the first poem I’ve written that I’m not afraid my mother will read.

This is the first time my mother has died.

Such lists unwritten still: First child, first whale, first baobab, first surgery,

first star-nosed mole, first banyan, first acacia, first of many roots, penetrating soil,

magnificent in delay. First fears feel first again each time, no matter how attendant.

I consider the biology of late bloomers: The axolotl who will only lose gills if pumped with iodine.

The titan arum that waits ten springs to flower.  Sequoia, no cones for one hundred fifty years.

Less clear is how, in my northern county, the witch hazel is the last to flower

some years, the first in others, intermittently, dependant on winter’s mediocrity.

Oblivious to calendars swinging past the new year,                                                             

its first bloom patient beyond all the fuss of chill and gale.                                            

-Catherine R. Cryan