The Otter and the Skeptic

There is no such thing, the Skeptic says, as actual bonafide happiness, anywhere in nature.

            

He dismisses “happy as a lark.” Every lark is unhappily afraid of the dark. Is it owls they fear? Or general lark superstition? Whatever. How about “happy as a clam”? Doesn't that smile proclaim how glad he is? “Hardly,” says the Skeptic, locked up as the clam is in isolation, sealed off like that, he cannot even imagine a state of contentment. Or any state. Clamologists say he has no thoughts or feelings whatsoever, congealed like that in a calcium ball; just as well say happy for the likes of a stone.

            

Did somebody refer to a “pig in clover” or add a note on “hog heaven”? The Skeptic reminds us that, awaiting every sow or boar, is the little matter of untimely slaughter.

            

Who recalls that famous accumulation of happified monkeys, and the barrel they’re in? “Would you be happy in a crowded barrel,” asks the Skeptic, “finding yourself in constant contact with so many pent-up close relations?” And some people mention the domestic cat, purring sweetly on couch or capacious lap. “Listen,” says the Skeptic, “he has memorized a strategic tree to climb more or less as fast as he can whenever his life cuts to the chase and he’s in the inevitable dog-and-cat race. And if he fails to catch his quota of mice, he becomes morbid. You can see it in his eyes. Remember that, about the cat.”

           

But wait a second a minute. There happens to be the indubitable otter. There he is: in or near his river, where, quick and instant, lissome, limber, he can always out-maneuver all the fishes and he can float in the water on his air-pocketed back and, holding a rock, causally strike and ultimately crack any crayfish for a mid-day snack. They run giddily after one another’s tails on a sort of literal merry-go-round. They live in a perpetual open-air amusement park, in their riverine scenery from winter snow to summer greenery, day night morn eve. After all the negatives, the otter is the one positive completely happy creature here on earth.

            

Moral: What the Skeptic needs is—another skeptic.

The Tapir

The tapir, you may know, is prehensile.

With his nose he can hold any utensil.

            But what’s really absurd

            is that he writes not a word

when someone gives him due paper and pencil.

            

Why in limericks and other places do we laugh at so many good creatures? Why are we so relentlessly superior?

           

Moral: Doesn’t it reveal how much we feel inherently and, instead, inferior?

Ebenezer Elephant

Ebenezer Elephant took a trip. He packed his—no, don’t go there—his suitcase, bought his ticket, said see-you-soon to some zebras he knew, one lizard, a friendly baboon, a giraffe he played cards with, and he departed on—or, rather, below—an airfreight blimp, carried in a huge sling underneath. He’d been given a sedative and he slept, swinging in the blue, swaying, rocking, lofted, out cold in cerebral goodbye land. The next he knew, he opened his eyes in Thailand.

            

He was looking for a cousin in the streets of Bangkok, and he found him with the inevitable mahoot on his back. (Thank God, I live in Africa, he thought, where all they can do is kill you.) Still his cousin confessed that it wasn’t so bad, life was better than it had been in the dwindling jungle where teak trees were disappearing because you, for one, were made to knock them over for squalid lumber. It made him sad banging down the columns of his very own ground for a pittance or only because the man on your back sometimes gave you more scrubs in your daily bath as extra reward. When they were done with the woods, there was a swath of long vast emptiness, your home ground gone, not a sapling, not a seedling, left standing, nothing but mounds and mounds of debris. So they left for the city, where they scrounged at night for garbage and handouts for the tricks the cousin had now been taught, just as demeaning as the circus where fellow workers had newly started. He thanked Ebenezer for the presents he had brought, and they parted.

            

Ebenezer flew home, swayed in the sling, not thinking, gratefully, of anything. Then he was home where he’d started from. He did not need any coaching now not to devastate all of his very own trees. But he would still have to take his chances on local poaching. One way or the other, though, he would never get down on his callous’d knees begging for handouts, pretty-please, ponderously.

            

Moral: It’s a close call between death and slavery.

Anecdote on a Poem, and Considerations Thereof

Anecdote On A Poem, and Considerations Thereof

by Jesse Bier

A pair of senior Montana parents, while in Portland, Oregon, happened to buy my first book of poetry, Don’t tell Me Trees Don’t Talk, which their adult son opened to a poem called, “Montana Young.” He read it and wept—not torrentially, they report, but noticeably. And unashamedly. Later on, after reading the book entire, he thought “Montana Young” held up as the best poem in the collection. Well, we all say, of course—after such initial and personal impact. It’s a good poem or it wouldn’t be in the book, but there are better ones (the longer title poem, for instance, and the short “Somebody’s Grandmother, Somebody’s Grandfather”) according to the now thoroughly objective and disinvolved author, who has his own emotional favorites but can rise to soften judgment when put to it. Still, tomfoolery aside (not his real name), there is something special in the instance of a grown man’s sudden and unabashed reaction to a poem of particular significance to him—and, I believe, to many other out-of-state Montanans.

            

It is a poem of dangerously hackneyed subject matter—leaving home—and indeed that cliché interrupted my writing of it a number of times. But the fact is, Montana leave-taking is especially poignant because of what the land and upbringing in it powerfully and uniquely mean to those young people who have to go elsewhere for a living, that leaving a kind of early death for them. It turns out that what was otherwise a general literary threat, treating such a usual subject, was a means to connect with the longer, emotionally fraught immigrant and emigrant American experience, one that Montana especially connects with, coming clear in the second half of the poem. As a matter of fact, while I was searching for a rhyme in the last lines, it was this developing theme of the poem itself that rendered “bereft” for the youngster, not their parents at the very end. For it is indeed the young, departing generations, leaving beloved land as well as family, who are double losers, not their Montana-rooted mother and father. The poem found itself, transcending the cliché of subject, growing organically and emotionally—not willfully or artfully for me. It came to its own governing conclusion, deserving its tears, literal or otherwise, from native readers who happen upon it. In which case, it is their poem, not mine anymore. 

Montana Young

Montana Young

            Our children grow, leave, and don’t come back.

Somewhere else they go. It’s the stupid lack

of labor. Shouldn’t say “stupid”: I meant that fate

is inept and misspoke my feeling. In their teens and twenties

they leave at a steady rate

because here is no state of plenty,

only woods and uplands and rivers and lakes

each one has had to lovingly forsake.

They’re not seeking fame,

but they go all the same.

They say, “We have to make our living.”

Maybe they’re back for ten days of summer or at Thanksgiving—

a pittance of return.

Mothers and fathers seethe and churn

in the hollow solitude they leave

behind, the next worse thing to grieving.

            They’re very like ancestors out of the past

Leaving natal land, to cast

themselves in a different, almost foreign place. French or Finn,

Irish, German, Norwegian—these young are doubly kin

to their own grandfathers. Why come this far in time and space

to run again the same—yes, stupid—race?

            And so our boy is in Ohio or Nebraska, far from the Flathead,

And our girls watch streams of Chicago or San Diego traffic instead

Of the Bitterroot or Yellowstone.

And we—you and I—are alone.

And mine and my neighbor’s son and daughter,

Far from the Skalkaho, Lolo’s summit, or the Clearwater,

Feel even more bereft

than those they left. 

The White Bison

Six conflicted animals in a western setting sought out a rare bleached bison so pale that he was thought to be a luminous sage. They wanted him to settle all differences that needed vetting.

            

Why did both deer and elk bed down in each other’s sites, when they knew only one of them had claimant’s rights? The skunk had a grudge against the porcupine, who had stuck a roving shepherd dog with his dagger quills, and that crazed or crazy dog kept coming back for more, always running down her skunk pups on the way. The marten and the weasel had their quarrel over who was to get at the squirrels, mice, and moles in the neighborhood.

            

All six stood before the blank mangy bison, who was really a scrubby beast, unfit for any judgments but ready to presume. Slowly and ponderously, he shook his shaggy head and said:

            

“What you have to do, in this subliminal world, is narrow your differences so that you have an absolutely clear-cut picture of exactly what’s irreconcilable.”’

           

“Did you hear that?” someone said.

           

“I heard ‘wreck.’”

            

Someone else said, “I heard ‘eerie.’”

            

“Wasn’t there a ‘submarine’ in there?”

            

Everybody heard what he wanted to hear, grateful for the leeway to go on doing what he was doing, and more so. What a wonderful wise old hoary bison they had.

            

Moral: People choose their leader to reflect who they are.