Poems by Penelope Schott
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Among the Other Animals
by Penelope Schott
Penelope lives on a ridge which separates the Tualatin River valley from the Willamette River, upstream of where the Willamette joins the Columbia.
Please excuse me as I carry this leg-waving beetle
out to the yard and watch it go.
Surely it values its walking to and fro upon the earth
as I value my own.
Sometimes I envy the salmon who knows how to go
back to the river in which it hatched.
I have been at sea a long time and am sniffing
my way home. This is the estuary
where the test of selfhood is not words or tools
nor any ability to anticipate death.
Nights when I answer the screech owl, music vibrates
the back of my throat,
a language half known: a Spanish speaker almost
understanding Portuguese,
until I become one in the common clan of beasts,
the animal itself, akin to kin.
© Penelope Schott