The Principles of Concealment

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.