DODO
(Raphus cucullatus)
Nothing vanishes, is gone ever. One might believe that there is nothing new under the sun, but something briefly flickers in and out of sight. Eyewitness accounts doctor a cooling account of the world left strewn like magnetic tape spooled out. One might build a shell from a hail of gunfire or hide behind the charred folly of the law. One might fall asleep. Shooting bison from a train window, one collects but a range of ghosts, faint in the way one might think of drainage.
There are trees cut down in worship of the stump. There are bands of iron and bronze that turn dates forward, hanging from the stump of a mast. In a green dawn, one must commune with more than one’s eyes passing over the ghost shape of a tree. In an object dawn, one must retain one’s coat of arms with the faintness of two smouldering stumps to measure the temples of God. One must stare into tamer versions of the sun where soft light denies the mythological.
It is loathsome, when the weight one must shovel reappears as shit. Each channel is a fraud of water. Each season a two-note sound. One must stretch and train each procedure and checklist to conform one’s self. How much energy does one have? How does one gather? Don’t be discouraged by the lack of answers, since one can train the eye to locate everything.
LEARNING TO OUTLINE ABSENCE
You might wonder how to describe the world around you. Typically, we make our first identifications by sight, but when compact consumption interrupts our patient weaving, our eyes fail. They fail in each attempt to wean away the apparent, instead desperately turning to time-lapse or multiple exposure, stacking lens on lens, map on map. The effect is the slow drift of transparencies over one another or the slow wind of pipelines through the trees of our ever-commodifying forests. In this, your description might resemble a spit take or a calm shipping terminal.
When you are in love and you can’t describe your feelings, this sentinel sticks to the script. It acts handsome and clever in each strike against attention. You might know my mind and I yours, but sound advice keeps us chained to the nightlife of our dense environs. But when I ask what the use of love is in all this, what straightforward braids mourn lost tableaus? A proper search invokes a captive speech. We raise our hands in vicinity and it is in that closeness that we press our faces deep into the grass, letting our arms scratch the branch of the nearest tree.
With the faint bait of a gold rush, you ought to forget all romance, clasping no cameo, adorning no calico gown with fur stitched to the cuffs. Employ instead a childhood formula, starting with a dioramic shrine to brilliant choreography. The shot should open under the crush of a final spread, the table filled with curdling childbirth. From there, pin until a territory marks no straightforward wish. And, as the light streams in from the collared shirts of your school uniform, watch nature stream watercolours more vulnerable than most.
This is what it means to let go, yet often there is a subtle underpinning to our endless pining. Often a melody turns where a head cannot. Great care must not describe each feral bird as if its flight were silent. The art of description is instead monotonous, sounding just one syllable until it nods its head as it walks.
IMPERIAL
WOODPECKER
(Campephilus imperialus)
He pinned the delicacy of his crest next to old-growth distribution maps. A faint watercolor portrait of border intensification in the countries that feed on the heartwood chessboards whose lines are defined by 700-mile fences. Feathers will be ground into the thinning broth of youth, which silences the desert’s skeptics by conjuring magnificent languages that race the wriggling course of the Red River. Cheap wood in a barrel-type heater chokes out English to the beat of jet engines and biodiesel. He ground his chest into beating sheet metal to mobilize public opinion of the amber-glowing dim of ecotourism and its vision of a cure for country living distilled from the fading documentations of winter.
GREAT AUK
(Pinguinus impennis)
First, one must learn to abandon carbon and oxygen and water without a cheat sheet. This new climate carries no rookeries, no seashore access, no nested common. It is a rich clime of bare rock, serializing each wave.
One tiny swallow a day pumps months from one’s process. Perched between towers, many an aquarist attaches to bacteria. Many a swallow seeps into the stomachs of better filters. One’s body must interrupt all vitamins and nutrients. One must cling to dress code. One must dissolve the diamond dispersal patterns of one’s own molecular structure, where there may still be small enclaves.
Even young children know to finance. They bet on quick transitions and a diet that proves no one will need to live without disease. Each of them dreams of a slow swim to burial. A dream that begins with oil pouring from the eyes, a white patch or blindfold. A dream woven of a fine down. A dream whose price is a textbook series’ rich disapproval. In this, remember that a redwood tree lives for a thousand years and a man can drink saltwater without harmful effect. The nitrogen cycle is mere fiction and settlement patterns are cyclical. If one dreams, it must be with an eye on cost, since, even with more adept equipment, the desert may not reveal a rich diversity. One may only catch a glimpse from the grave, buried in a stone cloak. The arctic wind is deaf. There is no test of end, no great day when the pan fails to taste like fish.
LAUGHING OWL
(Sceloglaux albifacies)
If one opens a pocket, it may be picked. The coins will tickle the folds of the mantle, edged with snow that melts in a thought. A melancholy stroll marks the mewling notes of fabric as it shifts. A drifting rain weeps in an accordion’s drawl. From a distance, then, one scene unfolds across the frame of another and, now, can accommodate new populations that choke up little support. The past deposits little that stands firm in storms, little that flees to caves from madness. None in a pair will turn blind, but, fruitless, none will congregate in the trees, folded between the leaved shag of sight. One must carefully tease out the threads of outbound saddles following the well-rutted garden path. One must peel back the vivid hues of each summit to confirm the faint wastes in each trip. One must keep a careful vigil.
HOUTING
(Coregonus oxyrinchus)
There is a startling falsehood to the turning current, the flow brackish. A failed nation traced overlap, its migration a poured refuge. One must distinguish useful from the rise of harbours, the accretion of cardboard and tin. The basins that cobble into accident. One should look deeply into the startling music of rivers draining the nation of conversion, of sails numbering in the thousands throating airborne spears. Numbers turn the air. Titles turn the flooded meadows, waking estates in the reed beds.
ryan fitzpatrick is the author of four books of poetry, including the recent Sunny Ways
(Invisible, 2023) and Coast Mountain Foot (Talonbooks, 2021). Their
first creative nonfiction book, Ace Theory, will be published by
Book*Hug Press in 2025. They are the 2024-25 writer-in-residence in the
University of Alberta Department of English and Film Studies. Their chapbook Spectral
Arcs will appear in September with above/ground press.
