Category: creature watching

what learned to stop rising

On the Golden Toad (Incilius periglenes)

The year the rain didn’t come, the toads did not rise. This creature required conditions, resisted the rescue of cages. They lived most of the year underground, waiting for the world to signal conditions for their appearance.

When they emerged, they emerged together, bright as warning, an astonishing whole. A joyous display, observers said. It would not stand for translation. When the clouds changed and the pools would not hold, the pattern discontinued. 

Their discovery and disappearance happened in quick succession. The last of it when I was eleven.

I knew nothing of the toads at the time. I was learning to read the atmosphere, to time emergence. How to translate the strange creature I was into more legible forms.

The process, I was learning, required aggressive taming. The first rule of living here was learning: one must not be too much. Too expressive, too taken by joy, eruption, wonder, body. 

I never saw the toad. By the time I was old enough to take my own inventory of loss, she had long since lost the predictable rains she needed to appear, having entered the realm of beings named only after they are gone.

what survives

On the Guam Kingfisher (Sihek) and the Preservation of Bodies

This is a story of extinction that appears as a continuance of life. In which the life in question persists in captivity. Where the life in question is removed from her presence in a world. This happens when the life in question has survived the loss of a world.

For what purpose, this silence? This heavy-handed saving. This bird. These brilliant blue wings. These heads of rusty cinnamon.

She of the long-ago understory of limestone forests, who birthed within the soft rot of trees left standing, of a wilderness allowed to age—until progress arrived.

Who needed darkness without predation to sing the day through her light.

Legends called her the loud woman bird. She of the bright fabrics—until.

This is a story of snakes who came in on cargo ships in the wake of the war, who raided the nests at night in forests raided by day, until the remaining canopies stopped speaking back, and presence became a memory.

This is how captivity preserves the body whose world has gone. The body whose world has gone goes on living, held in an unfinished until.

*

Context: I am working through some memoir material and it needs a larger container. So I’ve been researching species declared extinct in my formative years, and working toward understanding various connections between these stories and my own, which was largely dominated by a sense of horrors happening quietly without comment by anyone in my immediate environment. Considering each lost species in a space outside of these longer, more complicated essays-in-progress helps me to gradually understand the relationship. Thank you for reading with me.

there is nowhere else to go

a practice of staying

This is about craving stillness at a time when loud men go around insisting you are either chasing or being chased. This is what passes for insight around here, so I prefer silence. The other night I dreamed I was in Joyce Kilmer’s memorial forest in the Smoky Mountains, among the last contiguous old growth in these states. He who had lamented before he died, how he could only offer poems whereas trees were something else. I woke saddened to realize that the day ahead would take me elsewhere, so went on daydreaming about a future walk, in a rainforest up the coast behind the clouds, above the gray sand. I went after it in the nearest book and found the gray bark of redwood standing as the silent columns of a ruined temple; the sword ferns chest high, the air tasting of lemons. Someone is running up ahead. I am trying to hear the hermit thrush. The light here is an underwater light and the surface of this sea above this grove is in the sky and even the birds are quiet at this time. This is a leaning in. Here, years move in a circled dance. There is nowhere else to go.

Inspired by recent readings: Richard Powers’ The Overstory, Richard Preston’s The Wild Trees, and Monica Gagliano‘s research into Plant Communication. 

keeping time

on holding and release

Before going anywhere
we collect signs
from underground,
unseen but necessary.

I am interested in time,
but I will lose the clock
and I will lose the body,
still bearing the world.

branching with her
into other bodies—
bird, whale, tree
who collect me as
bower bird gathers blue—
glass, feather, button—
by arrangement.
I am tethered this way,
then let go.

But made for keeping,
I draw it close again,
marry it to breath,
to release what flies
from limb to future
limb, by losing

the thread—another
way to keep the fabric
as it thins.

Goodbye, we call
to the silhouettes
that shimmer past
what light it leaks
like ink in water,
blooming.

without conditions for return

after the Kauaʻi ʻōʻō

the last of a family
you lived on honey,
music, snails

crushed underfoot where
the livable world
was a corridor tightening

options closing
without announcement;
an old story of land
redrawn for what could be taken

in the name of progress—
clearings; in the wake
of a promised future,
bodies left behind

survivors, too,
until gone

forest birds arrive as call
before sight, whole
genealogies; ancestors
moving in the breath of leaves

some blows banish not only
the home, but all conditions
for return

now a recording,
still calling

notes from proclamation season

“One must not be too romantic about stability.” – Simone Weil

I sought stability, to make it out of love.
Which I did, and continue to do.
While the ones who never knew

its substance, or how to make
any of it for themselves, come
barging in on missions and leave
a mess. I clean again, then rest,
and breathe relief.

One of these warriors, gone off
again now, would make better
company if he were ever here
or anywhere close to here
or now.

Who still keeps proclaiming how
he means to make it his next mission
to care for me. If there’s one thing
I don’t need to be, it’s another man’s
mission toward eternity.

He’ll return to see he’s made
another mess of another failure
of grand proclamation.

This is why I prefer the cat’s company,
her present immediacy, attention.
Who teaches me in her steady gaze
that I am not yet half as grounded
as I mean to be, as I keep being
pulled away.

horse & rider

a tribute to the moment, and this place

Yes child, maybe one day,
in another world, the horse arrives,
its rider gallant and able. But now
is not that world

and this is not that time. Now he
spins, having lost both horse and will
to ride–– and besides, has never learned.

You are alone–– yet, look around.
Find the company of everyone before
you who has ever learned the same.

There is no more now
to do than there was before, only
less illusion. Carry on. Chin up.

Giddy-up. You are the horse
and the rider. Go on.

note on scale

of a life

so much before me happens
& by the time i arrive, i am
primed to recognize how
small i am

& after many years
of carrying this
imagined burden to
consider, with
considerable relief

––how
relevantly so,
and know
how fragile, too––

and yet, somehow
still here, a
spore of moss
on wet & craggy
rock to mark
this shore.

flightless

& unseen

Kitty recovers, and so do I. It’s the last week of school, a time of dizzy rush underscored by reflection. I think about endangered creatures. One among these is the flightless parrot of New Zealand, the kākāpō. Who, according to Māori legend, is a protector of the land. And I am thinking about the children.

A system built for speed cannot see the slow one, who never flew. Who, when hunted, knew to freeze. I think of her, now camouflaged in shadow—an endangered hush—now subjected to another survey. Intended to express how well we care.

But a check mark is not shelter and a rubric offers no refuge. How many shine like saints in the chill grasp of their handlers, being measured for extinction while staying faithful to their flightlessness? 

I’ve learned not to trust anyone with a grand plan because I once had one, too. Now I only want to shelter who still lives. To protect a child’s right to become what they will, even if that becoming looks like myth, even if they call it pest.

I don’t know what school is, only what it is not. One metric involves how well a person can pretend to be a person deserving of award. But that is not the work.

The work is learning how to become, and some of the brightest know better than to obey.

Do it. Don’t ask. Shut up. Or we’ll fail you and humiliate your mother.

And in other news: Kids Fail Critical Thinking Tests.

Marcos liked to talk to old people. Liked to hear their lives. He couldn’t focus on any task that felt designed to domesticate his wonder. The first act of a critical mind is refusal.

Consider the ones who vanish as portraits in negative space: Now you see me. Now I disappear.

Now I am a vase, now I am two people kissing. Now neither. Now both.

You thought your five-minute survey could find me? Think again.

Ask me who I am before I speak.

Ask as if you believe I might not answer.

Ask as if you know the form of your asking matters as well as your question.

There is much I have not said. Not yet––and no, I do not plan to fly. 

I live close to the earth, as I am, in these shadows, or I die.

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