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.