Art: Monstragity by Robert Ferrier

 Tundra Swans Twice

You don’t hear scientists beating up on the poets, as a rule, but the poets are always complaining about science. Poe called science a “Vulture, whose wings are dull realities.” Dickinson’s “Split the Lark — and you’ll find the Music” is one reworking among many of the Wordsworth conceit, “We murder to dissect.” The list goes on. I am not a scientist, and have only pretensions as a poet, but I’ve thought the two ways of seeing at issue in the poet vs. scientist debate, and on one occasion that was at the same time two occasions I saw a migrant group of Tundra Swans both ways. You don’t hear scientists beating up on the poets, as a rule, but the poets are always complaining about science. Poe called science a “Vulture, whose wings are dull realities.” Dickinson’s “Split the Lark — and you’ll find the Music” is one reworking among many of the Wordsworth conceit, “We murder to dissect.” The list goes on. I am not a scientist, and have only pretensions as a poet, but I’ve thought the two ways of seeing at issue in the poet vs. scientist debate, and on one occasion that was at the same time two occasions I saw a migrant group of Tundra Swans both ways.

I am a birder who works (in a non-bird-related capacity) at a small liberal arts college a mile from Lake Michigan, whose western shore is an ancient migratory route for hawks and cranes and waterfowl. In fall, when the birds travel this route in big weather-driven waves, I take binoculars to the roof of my building to see the parade. Posted there over the years, I have seen extraordinary things: a lone Whooping Crane who had attached herself to a skein of southbound Sandhill Cranes, a Golden Eagle, perhaps the only one migrating east of the Mississippi that day. On several occasions: Tundra Swans.

Tundra Swans are not a rare bird. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature lists them as a species of least concern despite a population that is declining slightly due to habitat loss and hunting. But they are a bird, to me at least, of special charisma for their beauty in flight and the majesty of their four-thousand mile migratory journey. The eastern population of Tundra Swans breeds in the Canadian arctic and winters on the coast of the mid-Atlantic states, many in the Chesapeake Bay.

The range maps for Tundra Swan represent the migratory path for these eastern birds as a broad stripe funneling south from coastal Nunavut into Saskatchewan and Manitoba and in the upper Midwest making a strong bend to the southeast to descend through Wisconsin and northern Illinois, crossing the south end of Lake Michigan en route to the coast. On the morning I saw them the swans were going east toward the lake, having turned an  invisible corner in the sky.

The stairway to my roof is sometimes dark and when I came out of it, my eyes adjusting, the birds were already crossing the sky half a mile to the north. I imprinted on them as soon as my vision came back — white birds, long necks, gaining altitude on a vector toward the lake — but there was a full four-beat measure before my birder’s mind caught up with the imprint: Tundra Swans! Here was a coming together of two ways of seeing: the first immediate and wordless, the second analytic and systemic. In those four seconds the taxonomist’s gaze replaced the poet’s.

It is no trivial question to ask which of the two ways of seeing is true vision. Tundra Swans breaking upon the surprised eye in a way that is aboriginal and pre-cognitive; Tundra Swans caught in a gaze informed by taxonomic structures of thought. And like most non-trivial questions, mine is a very old one. Emily Dickinson asked it of the Lark. E.O. Wilson, in one of the essays in his Biophila, asked it of the Bird of Paradise. How do you like your bird, ladies and gentlemen, whole or dissected?

Perhaps I should prefer the poet’s aboriginal way of seeing as innocent, even Edenic, purged of the abstractions of the reasoning mind. Perhaps I should prefer it as, for me, a vision that is rare and difficult to sustain. After all, it took a tricky chain of circumstances for me to see the swans whole and nameless, and I couldn’t see them that way for long. But the truth is I prefer seeing my birds through the taxonomic lens of the scientist. I’ve worked hard to see things this way, for one thing, going to sleep with the Sibley guide, training myself to pair a thousand names with a thousand avian profiles. And I cannot lose the conviction that to see a creature through the network of names we’ve devised for it is to see it more completely, to see it sustained in an ecology of knowledge. Seeing Tundra Swans twice in a single glance was a privilege I may never have again; it taught me that dissection need not always mean murder.

In the author’s words:

Benjamin Goluboff teaches English at Lake Forest College. In addition to some scholarly publications, he has placed imaginative work — poetry, fiction, and essays — in many small-press journals, recently Unbroken, Bird’s Thumb, and War Literature and the Arts. He is the author of Ho Chi Minh: A Speculative Life in Verse, and Other Poems (Urban Farmhouse Press, 2017). Some of his work can be read at www.lakeforest.edu/academics/faculty/goluboff/

About the artist:

Robert Ferrier is a retired university research administrator living in Norman, OK. He received a BA in Journalism and an MBA from the University of Oklahoma. He has published a novel, The Witchery Way, at Amazon Kindle e-books at amazon.com.  He has won the Norman Tree Photo contest twice. His photo, “Magnolia Morning,” was the cover of the Summer, 2016, Dragon Poetry Review. His photo, “Diagnosis in Stasis,” was the cover of the Fall, 2012, literary journal Blood and Thunder, University of Oklahoma College of Medicine. His poems have appeared in Dragon Poetry Review, Oklahoma Today, Blood & Thunder, Crosstimbers, Westview, Mid-America Poetry Review, The Exhibitionist, Walt’s Corner of the Long Islander, and Red River Review. In 2007 the Norman Galaxy of Writers nominated him for Poet Laureate of Oklahoma.