Soon, I will no longer be the age my mother was when she gave birth to me.
***
I drive to pick up my canary’s ashes during a solar eclipse. At 99% totality, I park outside the vet office and sit on the hood of my car as streetlights whomp on. It grows momentarily chilly, and then the sky brightens again.
Inside the office, I am handed a box of ashes so unexpectedly light that it feels like holding a negative—less like carrying, and more like tossing something up into the air without ever catching it.
***
I remember how it felt to cry as a child. The acoustics of my cranium.
***
Paul Fussell suggests that meter, rhythm, and prosody are connected to the totalizing experience of our bodies. Poetry, he writes, mimics the “alternating and recurring phenomena of breathing, walking, or lovemaking” (5-6). Whether it is the pleasure of foot-tapping and hand clapping, the delight of a dance, a jaunt, or a kiss, poetry expresses our passionate temporariness.
***
In an Oxford lecture, Paul Valéry defines poetry as an involuntary and fragile state, sometimes induced by movement. He describes latching onto a sudden generative relationship between his footsteps and ideas while walking. “There is a certain reciprocity between my pace and my thoughts,” he observes (216). He uses the word “musicalisés.” Musicalized (214).
***
My canary used to sing. His songs were like laser beams or fluttering sirens, like the sound of crickets mixed with crushed sunshine. Now I drive home with his ashes in the passenger seat, thinking of Diane Seuss’s “Song in my heart,” reciting to myself: “battery’s dead I killed it, canary at the bottom / of the cage I bury it.”
***
I rode home with him in this same car for the first time. He was also in a box back then, but alive. It was a box so resplendent with the lightness of being that I almost couldn’t believe a bird existed inside of it, save for a tentative peep, the occasional skitter of his feet. I named him Jitterbug.
***
Iambs are often compared to the heartbeat—a universalizing, lifegiving rhythm. Whether you use a technical term like iamb or lub-dub, it is the first sound mammals hear in the womb. A music that can be given, and that must be carried.
***
Soon, I will no longer be the age my mother was when she gave birth to me. In “Parturition,” Mina Loy writes, “I should have been emptied of life/ Giving life” and then, several lines later, more delicately: “Have I not / Somewhere / Scrutinized / A dead white feathered moth / Laying eggs?”
***
I believe in a poetics of precarity that centers the musicalized body, birthing or non-birthing, the continual threat of love, death, and extinction. It acknowledges our particularities, but prizes above all else the embodied heartbeat. Wingbeats too. All locomotion, however minute. It is a poetry that invites velociraptors, trilobites, and octopuses. Yes, even—perhaps especially—a dead canary.
***
In “Poetry,” Marianne Moore considers the movements of animals: “elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under / a tree.” Babette Deutsch asserts that words are “our means of signifying the strange table spread for us, with its offerings from the sea, where the plankton and the whales and the sharks are swimming” (10). Elizabeth Bishop describes a fish’s eyes shifting “like the tipping / of an object toward the light.” Glimpsing five hooks that have pierced the fish’s lower lip, signifiers of pain and resilience, the speaker exclaims “everything / was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! / And I let the fish go.”
***
I want to write about the dynamic intimacies of animalhood, but also its bewildering distances, how every step towards recognition is also, necessarily, an act of relinquishing—a rainbow of letting go.
***
For a week, I held Jitterbug as I administered medicine using the tiniest syringe. He clasped his feet around my pinky, belly-up, heart beating while I prodded open his songless beak. I could never quite tell whether his eyes were following me.
***
In “Canary,” Rita Dove writes, “If you can’t be free, be a mystery.”
***
For Deutsch, words help us contend with “the old enigma in the blankness beyond the spaceships and the undiscovered galaxies” (10).
***
I have a recurring dream where every canary that ever died in a coalmine suddenly bursts through the floorboards, a confettied mass of color rustling tunefully skywards, fusing into a yellowy nebula.
***
An estimated 75% of all species died in the K-T Extinction event, including the non-avian dinosaurs. American bird populations have plummeted dramatically since 1970. Nearly 1,000 wild birds died one stormy night in 2023 after colliding with a Chicago convention center.
***
Poetry can transcend precarity, renegotiating the bodily stakes of living and the pressures of lifegiving—if only momentarily. In my poems, extinct animals slip into invisible corridors beyond reality; the dodo and mastodon and thylacine are still alive somewhere; they are having a tea party.
***
At the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin, I visit my favorite fossil of Archaeopteryx, origin of birds. It’s hard to resist metaphorizing her. I imagine the movements of her once-living body. Dynamic even in stillness, she is written into stone, head thrown upwards, limbs splayed in a gesture of excruciating pain or ecstasy. Haloed around her, fernlike: the fine imprint of feathers.
***
Every being that ever lived still exists somewhere, musicalized in spacetime.
***
There is a poem I will never write about precarity, where I am much younger than my mother was when she gave birth to me, and I am sitting in the passenger seat while my father drives us home through Kansas City. I am holding a box in my lap with a living canary.
Works Cited
Deutsch, Babette. 1974. Poetry Handbook : A Dictionary of Terms. 4th ed. New York: Funk & Wagnalls.
Fussell, Paul. 1979. Poetic Meter and Poetic Form. Rev. ed. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Valéry, Paul, and Charles Guenther. 1954. “Poetry and Abstract Thought.” The Kenyon Review 16 (2): 208–33.
