A Newer Wilderness

by Roseanne Carrara

  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 —