The Pleasuring Ground, or This Week in Animal News
The number of "dee" suffixes used at the end of the call denotes the size of the threat.
The more dees, the bigger the threat. So if you hear the call "chick-a-dee-dee" that
means a smaller threat than if you hear "chick-a-dee-dee-dee-dee." Of course, the
threat level is from the perspective of a chickadee.

In Rajasthan, a camel chews the head off its owner after standing
tied all day in the sun. A gorilla is shot with its huge cartographic

hand encircling a human child's forearm. A bison calf washes
down the Madison, is stuffed shivering in the trunk of a tourist's sedan

& euthanized when its herd does not accept its escape from loss. I find
a note I've written myself: albatross, three-hinged wings, multiple mothers.

Lovely, but I've forgotten where I was headed with it. The black-capped
chickadee has one of the most advanced nonhuman language systems

on earth. Their song can say, I hop on the ground, or I fear from this branch,
denote a threat in the air, or from below, & summon their fellows

to mob. In the original language of our nation's first park & its second
chance wolves, the land we share is dubbed a pleasuring ground. This year, we

will shoot grizzly bear for sport. The judge in the NYT article condemning
the de-endangerment of the wolverine calls the beast cryptic, old word

for occult, for mysticism worthy of concealing: term for the wishes
of the dead, the tomb where we bury alive the ebbing babble of the wild.

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Copyright © 2020 Corrie Williamson All rights reserved
from The River Where You Forgot My Name
Southern Illinois University Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission