creature watching Archives

notes on getting grown

with monsters

One of the scariest parts about turning from child to older is the expectation that you will know where you are going. One monster leaves her legs behind before flying. Another can be kept from finding itself again by a sprinkle of salt.

Spend long enough studying these things and eventually you stop asking whether they’re real and start asking different questions.

Where is the nearest river?
How much water is left?
Where are the birds going now?

The Vetala prefers fresh bodies because they still know how to speak.
Fill the bathtub before the water pressure drops.
Kelpies cry before storms.
If lost, leave footprints in mud or snow.

Distress signals come in threes.
Most demons look ordinary.
Emergency flashlights are hanging from the shower hooks.

Turn your ears toward distant sounds like a cat.
Three syllable words work best.
Project your voice:

Internet.
Coconut.
Spaghetti.

before

what birds know first

There are things the birds know first. The approach of a hurricane, a radiation leak, the poisoning of a river. You can tell that they know because they leave.

Sometimes a witness to their departure will not notice, until later. Looking back, they will remark how suddenly it occurred to them: there were no birds. Where did they go?

By then, the coming disaster had revealed itself. Before that, the birds disappeared quietly. For most would-be observers, their absence fails to register. It is a non-event. The catastrophic ones are often preceded by a series of non-events like this.

The birds know when to go. It is believed they also know when to return. On that count, those of us in the disaster zones look out and sigh, waiting. And we say to one another, “We’ll see.”

“Wait,” we say, “and see.” Like we know.

Sometimes, though, the birds don’t seem to know. Or if they do, are without other options. That’s when you get the dead bodies around the poisoned lake along a major flyway, or whole flocks falling from the sky. That’s when scientists arrive to collect the bodies.

“We don’t have enough evidence,” they say. In every official briefing they repeat this sentiment. We are in the middle of a non-event. In a time that has no other name, which is called ordinary time. One day we may call this time by another name: Before. But any before is nameless when you are inside it.

wild fools

beyond the towers where the guards stand waiting

Oh, you are a writer? Give us a hero story, then! We’ll get the popcorn, let’s go.

I am not very interested in the hero story.

Tell us about the dragon! How it was slain and everything is safe again!
I cannot. I have no faith in the premise.

I have always loved dragons. Imagined ones, metaphorical ones. Besides, I tend to talk to lizards when I walk.

I tire of the way the story must always be about the hero, or those waiting for the hero, or those tending the hero, or those preparing the world for the hero’s return. I want to know who kept the living going while all these heroes were off on their quests. I would like to hear the lizard tell what happened.

It is curious how often the dragon dies only for its guarded fortune to change hands. The gold. The virgins. Another castle.

I have become suspicious of people who can state what they are about. Perhaps this is required now. A mission statement. A brand. A clean line of purpose. Meanwhile the shadow goes about its work.

I know only that my blind spots arrive in multitudes. So, I keep watch instead. I make little shelters. It’s much more bird feeder than monument.

Hi, birds.

There you are.

Take what you need.

I have no illusion that I am feeding you.

You are feeding me.

Language feels this way, too. I’m not climbing Jacob’s ladder or pulling a sword from a stone. I am near a hearth, tending a loaf. I keep making the same loaf, because wherever I am, there are always hungry mouths. Take what you need.

Hi, birds. There you are again. Beyond the towers, where the guards are waiting, the gardens have begun again without the hero. Come eat.

hello, stranger

on skinks, swans and other guides

I like the creatures no one chooses as a spirit animal. Skinks. Ice worms. The little dog whose back legs are supported by wheels and who is walked faithfully around the block by a small old woman. If approached from the opposite direction, there comes a moment when she looks up, surprised, with a wide mouth and kind eyes.

The bowhead whale, Balaena mysticetus, may live over one hundred years in the cool depths near Greenland. Or the shark of the same region arriving at reproductive age no sooner than the end of the first century alive.

Also swamp sparrows.

Cephalopods.

Bagged goldfish.

The as-yet-unnamed ones, still undiscovered.

The swan of Hans Christian Anderson’s Ugly Duckling, who does her best to fit in with the duck family she meets upon hatching, having no way to know that the egg she came from had only rolled away from its proper nest. Whose attempts at doing duck things fail the more she becomes her swan self.

At a formative age, I decided to be done with the person I seemed to be, and so I set about making a new self. I went about this the way a young, old-feeling person might: by cobbling together suggestions from available sources. Having decided I was missing something vital to the project of becoming, I occasionally took seasonal employment in places I had yet to visit. In the Sierra Mountains, I found unexpected teachers and learned to sing while walking so the black bears would know I was coming.

I also tried smoking while writing, like Joan Didion or Tom Waits. The experiment failed almost immediately. And yet. If I vomit, will that be the old self leaving? I persisted.

On New Year’s Eve, outside a restaurant, the old self remained.

Later that week, I left the just-opened pack of cloves on a wall at the edge of a Vons parking lot, hoping that whoever found it would take it as the kind of serendipitous surprise that announces fortune taking a turn toward some unexpected wonder. That they might pause to enjoy their find and feel themselves understanding that this place, routinely referred to as the Vons parking lot on Tamarack, is so much more.

That they might see it suddenly: an ancient geography of unknown forces.

And be moved to some greeting, however hushed.

Hello, powerful stranger.

That this discovery might nudge into being the possibility of an astonishing response from this sudden sanctuary. Which, while wordless, would sound the body like an urgent whisper.

Come here.

at the hour of the Angelus

after Leonora Carrington

Surely, I carry enough madness for the long voyage, having packed enough pieces, and left some, devilishly scattered about, to make for you a puzzle. From the railing, I scatter some upon the waves like fish bait. They rise and eat and I leave.

Immune to the affliction of telling anyone what I know, I know nothing except that I am a fuzzy form of human animal who will one day die.

For a time, I walked to and from walls of gray sandstone beneath birds of stone. The building is hollowed out now. Only the birds remain. If you approach, as I do sometimes, to paint from memory, they flit between the apertures.

No one is there but the birds, but whoever escapes the childhood home?

A giant goose commands the scene. A horned creature holds a broomstick. Three hooded figures at the table, one in dark glasses at the stove, the red-robed figure at her feet. Corn upon the metate to be ground and served with the fishes the nuns ride in upon.

At the hour of the Angelus, they sing the wild anemones from the woods. I go again to greet them.

aerial view

aerial view of an edge

What is this cut––eye of churned earth,
a cyclone pattern, continuance replaced
by some other hand.

How am I seeing, at this height. To look from above
at the place where I might, in another version,
be standing instead.

To learn something from this
—as once, a child, dreaming of flight,
hovered above her mother

in the supermarket’s fluorescent hum,
watched her push the cart
through pale green heads of wrapped iceberg,

bright torpedoes of cucumber
& claw-tied lobsters in their tank.
Between her mother & the ceiling’s light,
she learned distance.

Capillary of shale, piled.
A filament around the iris, worn thin.
Closer down, something else.

A spine. Whose? The engineers arrive
to play king, to play prophet,
to name inheritance into being,

city of gold, encased behind glass.
The glass, compressed sand
the diggers come to move.

They call it dirt. They call it mud.
They handle what little they see,
then leave.

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.