“Hunter Gatherers,” by Daniel Tobin

Poetry faculty member and 1990 alum Daniel Tobin was recently featured in Zocalo Public Square. Read an excerpt of Tobin’s poem “Hunter Gatherers” below:

Hunter Gatherers

All this late morning in the newly winnowed trees
squirrels are chirring, as though each one inside
had a miniature fan rotating urgently,
the impossibly rapid rpms of their language.

I can almost see through the thinned-out screen
of leaves a few tails waving like metronomes—
the wind lifting them? Or are they plumes, the nibs
of scribes at their appointed work, glossing

the margins, fearful the raiders will come again?
One, I watch him from my deck with the cats,
flies in a wild prodigious leap to the pole
(Be careful of the power box!) to tightrope across

this unsteady stave of lines to where they thread
under the eave. And up he hoists himself now
into the gutter, into the hole he’s probably chewed
into the frame, into the attic, to set by his store.

Read the poem in its entirety here: https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2021/03/26/daniel-tobin-squirrel-poem-hunter-gatherers/chronicles/poetry/