Brandon Kilbourne on “The Last Sea Cow’s Testimony” and “Muskox Memory”

One of the things that motivates me to craft poems about the natural world is that it allows me to engage with natural history from a vantage point other than data and statistics, with science and poetry together giving me a double perspective on the natural world. The two components to this double perspective strike me as complimentary, with both being focused on new ways of seeing. Science uses methods of measurement, hypotheses, and analysis to provide new insights into the natural world.  Poetry, however, strives for new insights into the experiences of living beings – human or otherwise – on this planet using the tools of form, surprise, and voice, among a multitude of others. 

“The Last Sea Cow’s Testimony” was based upon the poem “An Ox Looks at a Man” by Carlos Drummond de Andrade. Andrade’s poem presents an ox’s matter-of-fact view of humanity that provides a powerful outsider’s critique of the human condition. “Sea Cow” draws on this tone, employing it in the voice of a Steller’s sea cow instead of an ox. However, the sea cow’s voice critiques not the human condition in any broad sense, rather critiquing humanity’s treatment of the natural world and its inhabitants. Unlike Andrade’s poem, I employed a tercet structure. This choice was arbitrary; I somehow just fell into using tercets as I wrote the poem, and I found that a self-imposed constraint in form aided crafting the poem.

In having the sea cow tell the story of its own extinction, I was aiming for the story to reach the reader on a personal level. After all, the story of the sea cow is removed from us in terms of both time and phylogeny. This leads to the problem of getting readers to identify with the sea cow and the tragedy it suffered. This is a problem worth finding a solution to:  if the reader can identify with the sea cow’s plight, it causes them to then turn a critical eye to humanity’s behavior.

While I definitely had to exercise my imagination to write from the point of a view of a sea cow, much of the poem is based upon a historical source. In the process of writing it, I read Georg Steller’s The Beasts of the Sea, in which he gives the only living observations of Steller’s sea cow. He mentions the sea cow’s diet, its resting behaviors, and its initial fearlessness of humans. More horrifically, he describes in detail the butchering of still living sea cows and how their mates would follow them a far as they could in the shallows to stay as close to them as possible. This is the basis for the poem’s most violent scenes. The conditions experienced by the sailors was based upon Vitus Bering: the Discoverer of Bering Strait by Peter Lauridsen and Julius Olsen.

A particular challenge in writing the poem was to try and imagine how sea cows would understand manmade objects. For example, there are no trees on Bering Island, but there is driftwood washed ashore. Therefore, it struck me that a sea cow might understand a ship as being “whale-sized driftwood.” Likewise, the sea cow refers to fire as merely “light and warmth.” Through writing this poem, which forced me to inhabit a sea cow’s skin to some extent, I have to say that I have come to like sea cows more than I did previously. I hope this is also the case for the reader.

“Muskox Memory” is based upon being on Ellesmere Island in summer 2006 as part of an expedition to uncover fossils of the fish Tiktaalik roseae and other Devonian-age fish. “Muskox Memory” is part of a longer suite of poems about my time on Ellesmere. Going back to at least 2015, I tried now and then to write poems based off this experience, and for some reason in 2020, in the early stages of the pandemic, I found the inspiration and resolve to really pursue this.

As the photo suggests, the poem stems from an actual muskox skull found largely covered over by moss on Ellesmere. For most people, it’s unusual to see a muskox skull, all the more so one overtaken by moss. At the time, I remember being fascinated by this skull, and this memory was really the catalyst for this particular poem.

I see this poem differing from “Sea Cow” in two primary ways: form and viewpoint. The form to me is a long-take showcasing the speaker’s musings, being one large stanza in contrast to the tercets of “Sea Cow.” To me, the one-stanza form, particularly in light of the catalog within, swallows the reader a bit, and I think this is desirable, given the range of geologic time covered by the organisms cited in the poem. While this poem is, like “Sea Cow” concerned with extinction, the vantage point of the poem pans out to extinction as something of an ever-present natural phenomenon, instead of something being caused by humans.

The particular challenge of this poem was to try and “show” the idea that 99% of all the species to have ever existed have gone extinct. I first tried stating this directly in the poem, but that did not strike me as compelling. To visualize this for the reader, I resorted to a short catalog towards the center of the poem, consisting of a mashup of species from different geological times. Beyond this, I also tried to convey how rare a fossil is, being a mere “keepsake” of extinct species, as well as how detached, in a sense, the current state of the Earth’s landscapes and biodiversity are from its past self.

Extinction is a concept familiar to most people at some level. Despite this, I hope these poems “reawaken” readers to extinction as a phenomenon both ongoing and human-caused. If these poems succeed in making extinction “new” for readers, I further hope that they impart even a little fresh awareness of this topic and our planet’s imperiled biodiversity.