Trophic Cascade. Camille T. Dungy

      Ars Poetica: Mercator Projection

       Windhoek to Walvis Bay

      Pulp the plant and plant it new, that’s what termites do. We learned that from books one devoured while the other was driving. From the conferences convened inside the car. We’d come down from the highlands. Come out of acacia trees and into acacia bushes. We taught ourselves to gauge the age of a termite mound by the age of the acacia beside it. We founded a college, which grew into a university, for we had space and time. I watched one colonial town fade from the rearview and then nothing until another white-washed town wavered in our windows, its petrol station in view a long while. I grew restless with little to do but stitch and re-stich my notions. We had assumed we would hop in the car and arrive there shortly. We hadn’t adjusted our perspective yet. We wouldn’t adjust our perspective for hundreds of years. I spied with my little eyes: several journeys of giraffe, a congress of baboons, a pride of ostrich (baby ostrich, mama ostrich, ostrich—gray and white and black of feather, gray and white and black of feather, gray and white and black of feather—of an uncertain age), kudu—brown and beige of pelt and antler, brown and beige of pelt and antler—and signs warning kudu jump into the road. Nearly indistinguishable from the bush, all this life lived on before us. We sighted oryx with black noses to draw heat off their brains, an implausibility of wildebeest, a band of mongoose, and several confusions of guinea fowl fowling the road. At first, we felt as close to God as Adam, and as headlong, naming every beast and bird and bush with plastic specificity. I didn’t know an eland from a hartebeest, but the naming made them. We felt satisfied until we noticed how far we were past our star’s highest hour. We had descended from bushes to succulents. Driven from succulents to little but lichen scattered close to the stony ground. This reminds me of Lubbock, of the scratchy plains outside of Lubbock, one of us noted, though the other was napping by then, head toppled like our top-heavy globe. This reminds me of the moon. It was not long before the gloaming of the first day in the furthest reaches of our dreams, when what we were seeing couldn’t be compared to what we had seen. Rising in the distance could have been anything. Could have been fortresses. Could have been oceans. Could have been elephants. Could have been dunes. We were caught somewhere between the compact center of the earth and the earth’s exaggerated edges. Trucks drove toward us with long fishing poles lodged in their front fenders. Trucks drove toward us looking like catfish on their way to a cove that was bound to disappoint. I thought I was close to understanding where we really were, but that ceased to be the point a long time ago. One of us passed a strip of dry, salty meat through our own lips. One of us passed a strip of dry, salty meat to the dog. We climbed out of the car inside a grayness and put up our tent in the wind. The sun set before we got the fire started. There were no stars to speak of, only fog and clouds and a long night sky, jackals packed and cackling in the distance, the road ahead of us still.