Saturday I was talking to a friend who lives in the woods. I mean really in the woods. From his kitchen window he can watch the pristine little creek twenty yards down the hill. Every so often a blue heron wades past. Where an old tree has blown down a gray fox crosses the creek. Pretty wild. And yet as we were talking he noted his regret that he never sees whippoorwills any more. Hasn’t heard one in ten or fifteen years.
Yesterday morning I left Elkin at 6:30 to get to the Zoo plenty early. They’ve just finished a year-long project widening a stretch of 421 through Winston-Salem, and you know how a fresh roadway cut looks: planed-off angle of clay sown with chemicals and sprouting grass monoculture. Just before the new exit ramp, at 7:15 in the morning as the city revved up, a female wild turkey strolled blithely along finding the odd beetle or something worth bending over for.
Pretty wild.
. . . . .
Today I was privileged to meet with Dr. David Jones, Director of the NC Zoological Park. Before assuming the post here in Asheboro he was director of the London Zoo. He has worked with animals in more countries than I know the names of. His photographs of Africa appear in many of the interpretive displays around the Park. And the curators and staff he has assembled are equally impressive.
This evening Dr. Jones presided over the dedication of a new outdoor sculpture (installed along the trail up to Sonora Desert). Piedmont Totem is a pottery tower created by students and instructors at Montgomery Community College, a series of nineteen cylinders stacked into a column. Each piece intertwines native piedmont creatures and plants, beginning at the bottom with tadpole, fish, roots and culminating at the top with eagle and owl. As Dr. Jones pointed out, when viewed as a whole the work embodies the interconnected web of life. And as he emphasized, the primary mission of the Zoological Park is to have visitors discover those interconnections, and to feel themselves connected as a part of the web as well.
. . . . .
I blame people’s cats for the loss of whippoorwills, ground-nesters who depend entirely on camouflage for survival. Then again, maybe the raccoons are eating the whippoorwills’ eggs because the raccoons’ predators have been extirpated as varmints (may we hope that the coyotes that have moved into the countryside will eat the raccoons?!). Or maybe it’s all the skunks’ fault, since the only thing that will eat a skunk is a great horned owl, and I haven’t been hearing nearly as many owls lately, either.
Or maybe this whole interwoven web is so complex that every thread we disturb leads to three more unravelings. Who’s to say we can do without any of them?
But I still wish you’d keep your cats indoors, damn it.
. . . . .
The Clouded Leopards of Cambodia and Viet Nam
They are gone, almost, into the music of their name.
The few that are left
wait high and hesitant as mist
in the tallest trees where dawn breaks first.
Their color of mourning kindles
to patterns of stark white, random
and sudden as hope or daydream.
Moving, they could be mirrors of the sky,
that play of masks
behind which the ancient burning continues
to dwindle and flee.
Thousands of years in their bones
leap blameless as lightning toward us.
To come close to what they know
would feel like thunder and its silent afterword.
We would turn slowly on our shadows, look up
again to tame the shapes of the world:
monkey, temple, rat, rice bowl, god,
images echoed in the smoke of village cookfires,
in the drift of memory on the faces of elders.
We would stand in the clean footprints of animals,
holding like an offering our hope
for the lives of a handful of people,
a rain that is only rain.
Betty Adcock
. . . . .
Asked in an interview what she hoped for in her poetry, Betty Adcock replied “to tell the truth and find that it is music.” Living all her writing life in North Carolina, she as won many literary awards including the Brockman-Campbell Award of the NC Poetry Society, the Roanoke-Chowan Award, the Sam Ragan Fine Arts Award, the Raleigh Fine Arts Award, a Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a North Carolina Individual Artist’s Fellowship. Her most recent volume is Slantwise (LSU Press, 2008).
http://bettyadcock.com/links.html
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