Greg Keeler – Rock Chuck Hears a Logging Truck
Rock chuck is a rusty puff
who makes fat fists when she eats
and cheeps to remind us of
our own strong will to sit
straight up and whistle when
the world comes to pull us apart.
Her kids playing King of the Mountain
there on that pile of rocks
push each other off while Mom
stands yet the higher ground,
her atoms in sync with the same wind
that carries the hawk to them
or their scent to the coyote.
Everything here zags or circles
except the straight line of her voice,
vertical through the stream’s leap,
the pine’s shush, an axis of sound
in perfectly crooked spokes
to warn her world of us who are
coming to everyone’s senses
but our own.
Greg Keeler
September 1992 Earth First!
Wiki says: Their ears are small and well furred. The feet have five digits with stoat and slightly curved claws. The thumb is rudimentary but bears a nail. The palms of the paws have five pads with three at the base of the digits and the posterior pad being oval in shape.[2] The marmot has soft, dense somewhat woolly underfur, especially on the back and sides. Its outer guard hairs are longer and coarser and cover the entire body.
The yellow-bellied marmot has a wide distribution in the western North America. It ranges from south-central British Columbia and the very south of Alberta southward though the Columbia Plateau, Snake River Plains and the Great Basin and reaches its southern limit in the southern Sierra Nevada and White Mountains of California, the Toquina and Pine Valley Mountains in the Great Basin of Nevada and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in New Mexico.
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