PINK
Pink Floyd was a flamingo
That flew from the aviary
Leaving birds of a feather
Grounded in their concrete pond.
He lived a bachelor’s life
Out in Great Salt Lake
Feeding on brine shrimp
To maintain his florid color.
The only regional females
Had their wings clipped —
No matter how pink he got
They could not fly to him
He did not fly to them.
For many years he lived
The only of his kind
Among grebes and phalaropes,
A feather-boa fantasy
Of how we might go feral
In our adopted homes
And still be pink and fabulous.
In his honor I have planted
Pink plastic flamingos
Among the orange day lilies
Bright stalks in unmown grass
His great escape called to mind
When my niece went south
To visit two-toned penguins
And sent back a photograph:
One thin rosy colored bird
Soaring above blue glacial ice;
A single pink-fletched arrow
High-flying in pure sky-blue.
{NOTE: Pink Floyd was a Chilean flamingo that escaped from Salt Lake City’s Tracy Aviary in 1987 and lived wild at Great Salt Lake, Utah for many years. A proposal to import more Chilean birds in order to establish a great pink flock of Great Salt Lake flamingoes was rejected on the grounds that introduction of non-native species might harm the ecosystem, though it was argued that since flamingo fossils had been found in Utah it would really be species restoration. Pink Floyd was last seen in 2005.}
THE RHINOCEROS EATS AN APPLE
"Hélas, je suis un monstre. Hélas, jamais je ne deviendrai rhinocéros!" — Eugène Ionesco
When a woman offers you an apple
You never know for sure if it is poisoned
With the draught of eternal sleep,
The black ships of war, or knowledge
Of good and evil, yet it is irresistible,
That lipstick skin, the interior promise
Of juicy sweetness, and so the rhinoceros
Perks forward his strange small ears
And here he comes trotting with a bounce
In his step that is surely a dance,
Ionesco’s absurdist allegory
Lilting towards her on huge fleshy feet
Armored skin gray as storm clouds
Lit from behind with sunny virility,
Ferocious eyes gleaming in that massive
Boxy head, his whole solid body
Constructed to support the crushing weight
Of those mythological horns
On his nose. He would impale her
If she were not standing behind a fence.
In one hand the woman holds a bucket,
Of apples, in the other a round red
Fruit which she extends through the bars
In her bare hand, never flinching
As the beast comes snuffling, slavering
From it’s wide, soft, pliable mouth,
Toothlessly gentle lips that fold like fabric
Around the offering to eat it in.
How have we mistook the rhino for his horn
And never noticed the kiss of his essence?
CETOLOGY
Sometimes on days when work is slow
I take my lunchbox and I go
Down by the People’s Freeway
To the Garden of Modest Bureaucrats
Where I breathe the intoxicating patchouli
Narcissus scent of paperwhites
Planted in the Grove of Inferiority
Complex with Attitude near the statue
Inscribed, “To that sallow Sub Sub Librarian
Whom Melville mentioned in his book
Which is mostly about people chasing whales.”
The Librarian, too, was hunting Leviathan
And met with notable success
Finding him swimming though Genesis, Psalms
Job, Milton, Shakespeare’s plays;
The Marine Mammal Protection Act
Had not yet been written; Whales were prey
To Quakers and cannibals, but soon the bureaucrats
Would come armed with regulations; the whales
Would be saved from pagan harpooneers;
Melville, or at least his doppelganger Ishmael,
Was misguided when he wrote that chapter
Overstating the eternal, unbreathable
Future of these immensely vulnerable creatures,
Now even the oceans have become too small
To absorb the wrath of those damned whalers
Who must forever blame something
For whatever limb it was they lost at sea
While the Librarian sat calmly compiling
Folio, octavo, duodecimo of cetology
Steadfastly refusing to be drowned
When all hands on the ship went down.
The author answers
THE WILD CULTURE SCRIBBLER'S QUESTIONNAIRE
What is your first memory and what does it tell you about your life at that time and your life at this time?
I have a particularly vivid early memory of trying to walk along a narrow curb in a pair of high-heeled shoes. I fell and skinned my knee. Now that I am a grownup I own lots high-heeled dance shoes and almost never fall down.
Can you name a handful of artists in your field, or other fields, who have influenced you — who come to mind immediately?
Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Ruth St. Denis, Patti Smith, Alwin Nikolai, Edward Lear, Robert Smithson, Andy Warhol; and more locally, Terry Tempest Williams, Utah Phillips, Linda C. Smith, Mary Donahue, Sandy Brunvand.
Where did you grow up, and did that place and your experience of it help form your sense about place and the environment in general?
Salt Lake City, Utah where I still live is on the eastern edge of the Great Basin. The hypersaline Great Salt Lake is hostile to most life forms, but is paradoxically critical habitat for hemispheric populations of migratory birds—an apt metaphor for the entire state. Utah is about 60% public lands, so the experience of living here is to be engaged in a constant battle over who gets to use that land and what for.
If you were going away on a very long journey and you could only take four books — one poetry, one fiction, one non-fiction, one literary criticism — what would they be?
The honest answer, because this is what I actually do-- I’d take a non-fiction guidebook and whatever was sitting around unread on my bookshelves. If I were leaving tomorrow the poetry would be Allison Hawthorne Demming, “Genius Loci,”; The fiction, David Pace, “Dream House on Golan Drive,”; the literary criticism Craig Dworkin, “No Medium.” I haven’t read any of them yet so I can’t comment on whether they are any good.
What was your most keen interest between the ages of 10 and 12?
Reading, of course. I especially liked Edgar Rice Burroughs and Mad Magazine.
At what point did you discover your ability with poetry?
In high school I won a poetry contest. It went to my head.
Do you have an ‘engine’ that drives your artistic practice, and, if so, can you comment on it?
Much of my poetry is triggered by small moments of magic that seem to indicate unseen spiritual forces. I’m also driven to write by a childish sense of outrage that the world is not fair, but if all goes well that part is entirely edited out of the final version.
If you were to meet a person who seriously wants to do work in your field — someone who admires and resonates with the type of work you do, and they clearly have real talent — and they asked you for some general advice, what would that be?
Find out who your people are and figure out how to get your work to them. There are readers somewhere who will be delighted with what you are writing.
Do you have a current question or preoccupation that you could share with us?
I’m currently obsessed with the word “re-localize” which seems to have so many implications. Also, I’m trying to learn to play a button accordion.
What does the term ‘wild culture’ mean to you?
1) Culture that arises directly from the human spirit rather than from corporate and commercial marketing;
2) Culture experienced with corporeal people outside of the technosphere;
3) Culture respectful of non-human entities;
4) Nearly any form of dancing.
If you would like to ask yourself a final question, what would it be?
Why don’t you quit your day job?
AMY BRUNVAND is a librarian, part-time nature mystic and monthly contributor to Catalyst Magazine in Salt Lake City, Utah. She lives in the Jordan River watershed at the edge of the Great Basin.
Image credits: top, middle, bottom.
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