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The Principles of Concealment

By David Wagoner b. 1926 David Wagoner

If you’re caught in the open

In an exposed position, alone,

Disarmed, and certain you may be

Attacked at any moment, you should settle quickly

All your differences with whatever lies

Around you, forcing yourself to agree

With rocks and bushes, trees and wild grass,

Horses, cows, or sheep, even debris

To find what you have in common. You no longer

Want to seem what you are, but something

Harmless and familiar: in a landscape

Given to greenness and the cold pastels

Of stubble and field stone,

Protective coloration may be too much

To hope for, beyond your powers

Like the beatitudes of browsing

And those conspicuously alarming colors

That declare you’re poisonous

Or taste terrible—all may be doomed

To fail with an enemy equipped to kill

From a distance. Your shape betrays you,

And you should try to break it

With disruptive patterns: if an enemy sees you,

Not as a whole, but as a head distinct

From a torso, as legs or arms

By themselves—he may ignore you

And let you have your moment

In the sun as an abstraction gone

To pieces, as a surface mottled and dappled

Ambiguously by intercepted light

Like a man cancelled. But all these efforts

Will come to nothing if you move: one gesture

May catch all eyes. If you stand

Still then, or stay seated

If you’re sitting down, or go on lying

Down if you’re lying, an easy solution

May occur to you, cheek to cheek

With the hard facts of inorganic life:

That you have no enemy,

That no one is hunting you,

That all your precautions were a waste

Of attention better given to more rewarding

Evasions and pursuits. If so,

And you take your place again

As a distinct departure

From your foreground and background,

You should know it’s possible

For you to feel, after all,

At the first step, at the first crack

Out of the box, that lethal impact,

That private personal blow marking your loss

Of the light of day, the companionship

Of the night, and the creature comforts of home

As you become a member

Of that other civilization spreading itself

Around you, ready and able and still

Called the natural world.

Source: Poetry (May 1998).

Biography

David Wagoner is recognized as the leading poet of the Pacific Northwest, often compared to his early mentor Theodore Roethke, and highly praised for his skillful, insightful and serious body of work. He has won numerous prestigious literary awards including the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, two Pushcart Prizes, and the Academy of Arts and Letters Award, and has twice been nominated for the National Book Award. The author of ten . . .

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