summoned him, the drug manufacturer, emphasizing the
mischief
in his career as chemist or pharmacist in a backwards
Victorian age, and I saw him there with us, if only for a
moment, among the roses and medicinal herbs, talking of
the starlings
and their potency, more of a quack than a boss man, waving
jars of pills in the air around his head, there’s rue for you, I thought he might have said.
Sinister enough, so the flight began. You related to me and to
the bearded irises, withered then and drying,
how Schieffelin organized the introduction of all the non-
native avian species ever mentioned in Shakespeare’s
plays. One evening in 1890 (you tossed them up
in the sky with your fists, a couple of birds) eighty starlings
started from their cages and gathered in the open air
above an amphitheatre in Central Park, winging wide and
crowning
into forty pairs, couples on couples, the starlings keeping to
their own race amidst the furious paddling of the thrushes
— 24 —
and finches and whatever other birds Shakespeare
happened to settle upon in the plays.
And as you settled into the story of their spreading, I saw the
starlings taking to the eaves of the Museum of Natural
History,
building their nests, their spotted feathers half red with labour.
And I managed to see them, too, as you described them in
their reaches,
only a few years after their initial release, flocked along the
Mississippi, catching discards from the riverboats before
any one of those kitchen scraps or soiled papers could strike
the water. You said Schieffelin’s Starlings drove off native
species, the blue birds, woodpeckers, Carolina parakeets,
and I saw an individual starling cover over the blue
body of one of those blue birds and trample it to death, his
spots blurry furious, shunting whole corruption.
And your chorus – how the muscles in the jaws of the starlings
were engineered by some more vindictive God to open
rather than to close
as is the normal manner of birds, so that their songs, though
you had to call them startles, carried over and crooned at
least three times
louder than the calls of native species. With this I thought to
see a girl on her porch in Alaska, not more than nine,
forming the shadows of curse words
with her hands against the night sun because she was deafened
at some point earlier on, after being delivered into her
mother’s arms, say,
or while sitting too long under the hemlock, deafened by the
starlings and all the mimic sounds of North America
they drew across her as they arrived, en masse, sometime in
— 25 —
the nineteen-seventies.
You went on about the starlings flooding our continent in only
a few decades, grimacing Eugene Schieffelin,
and the starlings grunted his name, too, their wings raised up
beside them and their bodies forward-facing, fucking
like humans in nests of their own guano, nests that lined the
rafters of an Iqaluit storehouse and the power grids
outside of Mexico City – all at once – I saw them massed
in silver silos
hulking over the heaped grain. And the lights in a farmhouse
and a city condominium shut off simultaneously because
one starling got caught somewhere
in one sorry spot along this chain of being, starting a reaction.
And in this international blackout I had concocted in and
around your story, and
despite the extinguishing of all the man-made lights in the
night sky, I could not even glimpse the moon or the
satellites, because the starlings
spread out in a net, blocking all the sky imaginable with their
bodies, their own starry spots reflecting nothing.
With all this, you struck, finally, upon your sternest warning.
The point, you would say, of all this history was that we
have been destroying
our environment, and that we had better consider things more
seriously before planting more imported shrubs or sending
French guinea fowls to our aunt Cecelies in Idaho.
Some warning, and, because of its general nature, strange. You
must have known, for instance, that Schieffelin’s
initial attempt to release the starlings failed, that it took at
least two or three attempts for the starlings to mate and
multiply,
— 26 —
how he struck hard and harder to acclimatize the starlings so they would stick. Strange, as this bit of information would
have made your own story more tragic,
made the man a bit more sinister for his vigorous approach to
an entire evil. To rub it in a little more, you might have
mentioned, too, the act,
line, and scene in the Shakespeare, quoting Hotspur in Henry
Four One, vowing to make a starling wreak and repeat the
name
Mortimer in the ear of the king, to stir his anger, to enrich his ire. How this would have made Schieffelin and his damage
even more ridiculous,
his drawing a living army of Shakespeare’s birds with little or
no attention to their meaning or significance in his craze
to make a live concordance of birds taken from books. Sure,
there was your general, dull warning about the extensive
effects
of one man’s motions upon our mass of environment. There
was even your noise about the famous jaw. Yet you made
no connection, in your firm and final cautionary, between
Hotspur’s sore
urge, that fantasy from which the starlings were taken, and
what has become of us, how we are all kings with harried
ears, really, waiting for the wailing to stop.
— 27 —
REST AFTER
I am on the road when she passes, as they say. The news arrives
by phone, so I skip her house, driving straight to the hotel and
into bed.
Wired from the driving, though, and spent, I do nothing but spy
the two retrievers there – one golden, and one an almost bottle
red –
my father’s cousin’s dogs roam that house, straying, even, in-
between
the legs of nana’s stretcher. She rises a little, then, set out
and centred in her living room, delivering the last or just about
the last, full sentence she is reported to have said, which gets
taken as the keen
proof of her iron humour – that wry, fantastic wit she honed
over the course of the Great Depression. Get out of here, and shut the lights
on your way out. No one takes her at her word, or, wanting to
show
their own unwillingness to have her have her way, they carry
out their last defiances
then and there. The favourite lamp still blinks, and most who
mind,
in any case, are gathered when the night nurse calls the time.
— 28 —
THE END OF THE NOVEL
Though it belongs to everyone dwelling here,
and all claim it as their own, this is not a country.
The lovers here are tortured by their orthodoxies
and appearances. They both cheat. One so we can see it,
heaving and raw during his brief exile in America,
the other, only in retrospect, as evidenced in her
accumulation of material objects and her more staunch
religious devotion. When they come together,
having found themselves wanting, after all,
their reunion is supposed to appear high ecstasy
against the background of an embattled Israel,
the amphitheatre of fiction itself. Whatever kernel
of romance the author would convey remains
spoiled, though, for all their initial, heavy cheating –
too much representative of the war after all,
though perhaps it was meant to be so. In another,
the problem is not love in excess but its
extinction in installments. There’s the initial
passion, but someone else, angered by it,
in the old fashioned way, sends one of the lovers
away against their will. When they meet again,
the pair’s diffident. They appear alienated from one
another. Though only a quick diffidence is allowed
before they are lost in a bombing – more dreadful
because its sound is muted in the excitement over
the end of the war. All this is supposed to sore trumpet
again when we are told the reunion itself is a sham.
It has never happened, the lovers coming together, at last,
not their dying together, either. This last bit, as it turns
out, is just the villain’s therapeutic, part of the new
trauma revealed to us in the epilogue. I find
— 29 —
I am the woman in the third. Kidnapped by an ex-
boyfriend, a sex maniac who claims I am his first
and only love, I appear dull, obviously not much
of a catch because my memory’s fagged out, and I’m
trotting around his back parlour an amnesiac, applying
makeup on the hour (I’ve turned ugly or perhaps I
always was). No matter my appearance he can’t help
trying to convince me he’s done something very real
for us, even or especially as I make my escape. That he
also claims my adopted son’s his own’s easily conceived.
He’s had half a universe of women, after all, and he’s
desperate. Though the point’s that he’s diminished neither
by my going nor the death of my son that’s his loss now, too.
No, the point’s that after all these attempts to betray us out
of our senses, he makes a healthy conversion, if only a slight
one, to frank, old mysticism, finding some statue endowed
with the same little spirit that pervades them all. Having
read them, now, and experienced this last in more
than the ordinary fashion, I am equipped to speak on behalf of you
novelists, tell you that your capitals, romance, and realism
have broken up at last and gone into hiding. Do not leave it
to poetry to reunify them, ask for the live space of the lyric
or the sonnet as your alternative, say, superior, transport here.
Sacrifice your own. Send your children out (like the kids
of the big movie stars, yours are bound to amplify themselves,
as well, in your fame and fortune) searching with the old
pitchfork and scythe. Get a few good hurricane lanterns and go
back hunting for a moral and a bind for the good organ’s
writhing in this rush to make the psyche, callow personage,
promiscuous as an old miser in one of his jangling hypos.
— 30 —
A MUSCLE IN THE COUNTRY
This man who made a million as a minor
rock star in the eighties, one of those muscles
with fluorescent hair and an electric bass,
speaking, now, with a little renewed authority
(he’s made a comeback as a minor
television star) pronounces in his muscled
voice to the local radio host, his deep-throated bass
ripped and uncut, that he’s taken authority.
He’s done it, he says, he’s gone and bought a farm.
The city, it seems, doesn’t offer enough value
for his passing dollar. And he’s smart
about his money now. His million, no, not at all,
his million won’t buy anything comfortable here. But a farm
in the country, you can be assured of its value.
A good fifty acres is worth (and he’s smart –
anything less than fifty acres would be no country at all,
nothing to drive your snowmobile over
and get lost into) the expense.
It used to be that an estate
was extremely difficult to manage.
Men of little business sense, landed fools the world over
knowing little or nothing about the expense
of country living, had to give over their estates
for the sake of economy, would have to manage
themselves into a security by running away to the city,
enabled, there, to make some show
— 31 —
at little or no cost. They’d retrench,
sublet their great country houses so as to reappear
in the face of urbanity, there, in the city,
endowed and terrific. Today, though, the land is mostly show.
No need to be worked for profits. No need to retrench.
No men with bills who appear and reappear
upon your doorstep. No depending on your tenants
either, no rents on which to base your living.
Today, there are exports and greenhouses. Grow
anywhere, exchange it, and get what you want.
For instance, there are cows in Japan, tenants
of luxury, feeding on beer and oats, living
in bunkers the size of toothpicks but growing
fat in their daily massages. Those cows get what they want,
and so do we. We’re smarter about things. For a piece
of land, he says, the size of a barn or with a little extra,
a parcel the size on which a mule might wander,
but in the place of the agricultural, you can expense,
if you are careful, a new house, a garden, and a piece
of wilderness. The country’s cheap and with a little extra
effort, it might just get you happy. You might even wander
yourself into something spectacular if you expense
some extra time and a little of your own effort
returning your empire of sod to the forest that it was before
farming, that is, and the people destroyed it. When he’s settled,
he says, that is what he will have, a place bee-stung
— 32 —
with recreation. He’s alright. He just wants his efforts kept somewhat quiet, in the end, though nothing before
you ever really goes dead-quiet in the country. All unsettled
there, he knows, nature buzzes and stings.
And, on his new front porch, cutting somewhat of a minor
figure, he might just allow himself, he says, the muscles
in his arms pumped as he turns out his new, acoustic bass,
to think the birds cried out to meet him there in his authority.
— 33 —
ANNOTATIONS ON YOUR PASTORAL, SUMMER
It’s true. There is some heaven or delight in this hot landscape,
though the gods of love and war have not descended. They
never do. Those voices you hear behind the patch of trees
are only investors bidding on a
piece of land they’re going
to improve.
As for the men walking through the fields, crowned with corn,
as you put it, there’s nothing silent about them. All sweaty
and broken, they’re swearing their way from the
glassworks. Though I grant you it might be better if they
were singing some common song or silent as tombs.
Drawing from these, you say that you’ve come to realize that
your love for me is a viper in your chest or, as you
mentioned earlier, an incurable disease. We’ve all indulged
our tastes enough to acknowledge that there’s a certain
sweetness or pathos in a wrecked man. Still, I’ve left you
with some purpose. Let’s say the fountains were mouldy
and the grasses all burnt.
But here’s too much. Imagining me back again, you say that I
would be the cause of certain beneficial changes in the
climate. With me, the summer would bear less heat,
breezes would travel in my wake, flowers launch their
pistils and stamens higher so that the old garden would
flourish and form a shade. That’s not what I’m about.
Sure, if I came to you, singing, the few wondering trees might
shake their heads and lower the temperature a few
degrees, but the mountains’ and streams’ cheap echoes
wouldn’t make the night fall any sooner for all their air
and cool.
— 34 —
OF MINOR FIGURES
for Carleton Wilson
In Ælfric’s Life of Saint Edmund,
before the thieves come to prey upon the templed body,
to establish that the saint is indeed saintly,
the author meditates for a while, delivers
this canny description of the widow Oswyn.
In Ælfric’s Life of Saint Edmund,
beside silver and gold jars
that establish the saint is indeed saintly,
she fasts and prays with conviction.
This canny description of the certain widow Oswyn:
trimming Saint Edmund’s fingernails and hair, storing them
in silver and gold jars –
How much power she exercises, they’d say anweald,
fasting and praying with conviction.
As she manages the brilliant body of Saint Edmund,
trimming his fingernails and hair, storing them as relics,
aside from the saint himself, and his guardian wolf,
how much power she exercises, they’d say anweald,
gathering the relics, ensuring Edmund’s beatification.
As she manages the brilliant body of the saint,
— 35 —
A Newer Wilderness Page 2