Brandon Kilbourne

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

Photo credit: Pablo Castagnola

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.

Bethany Cutkomp

Bethany Cutkomp on “Forget the Warts” 

As an alumna of a rural Missouri university, I often get questioned about what we did for fun in a town that small. There wasn’t much to do outside of class and extracurriculars, so students often took creative approaches to fabricate their own entertainment. However, spontaneous moments of leisure proved to be most memorable. In the dead of night, phone calls from friends used to startle me out of a drowsy haze.

“Put your shoes on,” they’d say. “We’re going train-watching.”

Visiting the railroad tracks was a popular activity for locals and college students alike. We drove twenty minutes outside of town, past field crops, down gravel roads, and deep within the woods. Sparse residency allowed the stars to emerge to their fullest potential. On moonless nights, the milky way stretched over our heads. My friends and I sprawled on our backs, exchanging idle conversation under constellations we didn’t know the names of.

I’d realized how alive a Midwestern night felt when giving it my full attention. The damp ground and surrounding foliage stirred at our feet. Insect chirps and owl discourse echoed in a place undisturbed by human activity. Moving among such animation kept me awake despite my body’s internal clock.

When springtime rolled around, the toads emerged. Bellows and croaks materialized from all directions, impossible to ignore. Equipped with the mere light of our phones, my friends and I set off to play matchmaker. These creatures were a delight to seek out. Their stocky build made them fairly grabbable, and they accepted their fate with slack expressions that cracked us up.

“Now kiss,” we’d declare, pairing our finds with one another. The toads’ indifference toward the situation only made it funnier.

There was something that felt forbidden about it all—the world was asleep and a handful of us were out here being gremlins in the woods. During those moments of slogging around in the mud giggling, I’d forget we weren’t children anymore. Older adults looked down on us for our behavior, warning us that our skin would break out into warts. The risk was worth the fun.

I wrote “Forget the Warts” as a nod to the small joys that reside among the outdoors. This nightly ritual gave me a reason to roll out of bed when I was at my lowest. When channeling built-up anxiety into playful curiosity, my prior worries didn’t seem as significant as I made them out to be.

By the way, contracting warts from toads is an age-old myth. The lumps present on their skin are glands and are not transmittable to humans. While we should be wary of too much contact with amphibians—our differing skin compositions are not compatible and may cause irritation both ways—human warts are only contagious among other humans.

Remember that. You’re more likely to catch warts from your boyfriend than your frog prince. As long as you handle your nocturnal friends in moderation, feel free to be a goblin of the night with the friends you cherish most.

Emily Ford

emily ford on “The Return of the Black-capped Chickadee”

The world is changing every moment, but the world really changed in 2020. Among so much loss, I found solace in my journal entries from the fall of 2019, when I was waking up every day before dawn, walking in circles on the sandy banks of the Dolores River, and capturing wild birds for science. My prequel to the pandemic was also highly informed by the “Real and Unreal” tales of Ursula K. Le Guin. Her science fiction and fantasy carried me through The Times, from which I’m pretty sure I emerged with every cell of my body displaced or rearranged. From the thick uncertainty of that first year, to the unspoken haze of nowadays, the memories of my first season bird banding have been boiled, too. Within this never ending, well, end, of life-as-we-know-it, there is also a fierce, collective momentum to remember, to dream, and to find ourselves where it matters.

The chickadee always seems to be where it matters, caching, singing, traveling. They always seem to be . . . around. Have you heard one yet today? This little companion is a scientifically-proven genius rememberer, and she wasn’t about to let me forget the desert, and the river, and my walks, and of course—the birds.

Between then and now, we have learned that nearly three billion birds have vanished over the past fifty years. But at that banding station under a cottonwood’s enchanting marquee, we would simply count and release whatever came our way. Sometimes we wouldn’t catch anything for hours. On quiet days, my teammates listened to the static of my field note scribbles, and I am grateful for their patience, teaching, and guiding presence in these memories as well. While not all of my journal entries made it into the final version, I’ve included an additional excerpt here:  

Some birds fly into the net multiple times a day. I extract them from another fitful tangle and release them towards researcher-free vegetation. But if we recapture a bird after a few days or a couple of weeks, it could share important information about migration preparation and timing. An especially lucky moment is meeting a ‘re-cap’ from previous years or distant banding stations. Instead of one data point on a plot, each recap shares a personal geography mapped by light, magnetism, atmosphere, and landscape. The birds I have recaptured are some of the most personal wildlife encounters I’ve ever experienced. They are the original storytellers of far-off places, taking flight into uncertain winds, crossing invisible boundaries, and perpetually arriving home.

I often wonder how many human eyes have seen each exact bird before they are clutched in my hand. Then, I wonder if each bird leaving my hand will ever be seen again. So I try hard to see them. Not only if they’re a male or female, “hatch-year” or older, but also how a fast-beating heart warms up the cotton bag as I gently carry it from the nets to our banding station. I watch the sunshine introduce itself to the patch of iridescence on a Blue Grosbeak’s formative feathers. I discover that the Ruby-crowned Kinglet’s crown is rarely ruby; each one blazes a different hue from the spectrum of red rock sunsets. When a flock of twenty Bushtits takes us half an hour to extract and process, I witness their fervid conversations as they wait for each other to be released one by one.

I have returned to these scribbles for years, like a bird to a cache. The reasons why I share them now are also written there, in the margins of the salt and sand-leathered, bird poop-blotted pages, and are now much more legible in front of you. Some underlined, circled, and earmark notes read:

“Science IS imagination”

“Pay passionate attention. Appreciate the familiar. Notice what is ‘normal.’”

“Birds teach.”

“Birds smell good.”

“Birds are becoming my reason for EVERYTHING!” (this was written on the busiest day of the season, and is understandably the only thing written that day)

And finally, “The key to human survival, much like the chickadee knows, is simple: remembering the place we were, and staying committed to the places we can go. And that, my non-feathered friends, is accomplished through story.”

Thank you for reading and joining me in these reflections. For any personal follow up, you may email me at emilyford.ca(at)gmail.com or connect on Instagram @em_fo_. Bird banding stations are scattered all over the world, and many allow visitors and offer presentations and trainings. There may be one near you!

Karen Elias

Karen Elias on “Flight”

A couple of years ago, when “Flight” was created, I'd been listening to Leonard Cohen.  The song that captivated me was “Anthem.” It sounded, as it came to me over my car's audio, like the hard-won result of a long interior process, and indeed the song took Cohen ten years to write.  He was to say of it later: “I think it is one of the best songs I have written, maybe the best.  I know that song was everything that my whole work and life had somehow gathered around.  It is absolutely true to me.”

Years later, in the midst of a calamitous time, “Anthem” seems to speak even more clearly to our need. It takes a clear-eyed look at our broken world and refuses to be defeated by it, rising in triumph to that provocative dare that stirs us to shine – not in spite of the world's imperfections, but because of them. 

Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack, a crack in everything

That's how the light gets in.

What would it be like, I wondered back then, to walk around in my version of Leonard Cohen's world, camera in hand, and try to find equivalencies?  It would mean taking the song apart before putting it back together.  It would mean creating portraits of sorry objects that have still somehow kept their sheen.  It would mean breaking things apart to find my own song.

Some of these equivalencies were easy to capture: abandoned car with a shattered windshield, wooden bowl cupped in supplicant hands, string of bells tilted in several directions, teasing me with their promise of sound.

But I returned again and again, with some frustration, to these lines:

Ah, the wars they will be fought again

The holy dove, she will be caught again

Bought and sold, and bought again

The dove is never free

As you may well imagine, I did not happen to have a dove lying around.  Holy or otherwise.  If there was a place where I might get stuck, this was it.  Then suddenly there was a milkweed cutting in front of me.  I honestly don't remember how it got there.  I turned it around in my hands to catch the light.  I set it on a dark background and snapped its portrait. Turned it to the right, to the left, upside down and sideways.  And finally, there it was in black and white – a mere husk, yes, something left over, a remnant, but at the same time a form that flight itself had sculpted.  In the words of Marjorie Maddox's beautiful poem:  

brown husk of a wing

tipped up, speckled

            bird reminder

of chirp, of everything

still willing

            to soar.

It was my imperfect offering.