The Anthropologist: Arrival Trope
I came to study the grief of others
and found I already spoke the language.
The notebook. The measured distance kept like a clean
wound. I wrote: the men sing when the nets come in empty.
I did not write what the singing did to me. How I stood
at the useful edge of their sorrow, making it useful.
The tropics are always sad. Even the light arrives
gold and slow, the way memory works
on a life you meant to observe. I had methods. I had a tent.
I thought: I will not be changed by this. I took very good notes.
*
Moose
Not often seen in captivity: that enormous,
improbable head, the wide-splayed hooves,
a body so large it seems assembled from surplus parts—
built not for display but for sheer endurance
of difficult places.
Its great bulk tuned so precisely to the cold
that warmth becomes a kind of illness.
To keep one is to ask the impossible:
a sky that stays grey and biting,
an earth that thaws only halfway,
an air that carries woodsmoke
and the cold of a northern November.
I have been told I am like this.
That I require conditions no one can sustain.
That I materialize and vanish,
that I will not suffer the indignity of being known
at regular hours, in good light,
by people who mean well.
Maybe. But consider what I’m built for:
the frozen lake, the dense stand of birch,
a world that asks endurance and gets it.
Not every large thing should be kept warm.
*
Wyoming
Turn in now, brother,
lay down your name
in the sage and the silence—
let the sky take it.
Out here the dark has teeth.
The dinosaurs knew
this dark.
Stars from here to gone.
You are small.
Feel how good
that is.
Lay down with me here
where the Tetons
were still ocean.
*
David Chaudoir is a writer and anthropologist. His work has appeared in The Missouri Review, Notre Dame Magazine, El Portal, and Third Wednesday. He won the 2025 Perkoff Prize in poetry. He translates Arabic and Tajik literature and lives in Indiana.
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