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Poets at MQUP: Mark Abley
To continue our celebration of Poetry Month, today’s guest blogger is MQUP editor and award-winning writer, Mark Abley.
Poetry has many roots, many functions. One of its functions is elegy. One of its roots is the human need to recall and celebrate the dead. What I attempted to do in my poem “A Labrador Duck” is to stretch the traditional concept of an elegy so as to embrace an entire species.
Extinction is relatively new in the human imagination. Through most of history, it made little sense. In the 18th century Carl Linnaeus, one of the founders of modern ecology, believed that human beings could never cause the extinction of an entire species. Today, alas, we know better. It’s all too clear that “we the people” have been directly or indirectly responsible for the extinction of hundreds of species of wild creatures, and the prospects for thousands of others look grim.
A few extinct species have become iconic – the dodo, for instance, and the passenger pigeon, which once darkened the skies above North America with flights in the tens or even hundreds of millions. Slaughtered through the nineteenth century with mindless glee, the species collapsed. The last passenger pigeon, named Martha by her keepers, was a feathered celebrity by the time she died in the Cincinnati Zoo in September 1914.
Other extinct species were never famous. They’re remembered mostly by specialists. One of them is the Labrador duck, a mollusk-eater which probably bred in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and along the coast of Labrador.
Unlike the passenger pigeon, the Labrador duck slipped quietly into history; nobody knows when the last one died. Much about the species will always be mysterious.
Some years ago I took a close look at one of the 54 stuffed specimens in the world – this one preserved in a museum on the campus of McGill University, a five-minute walk from the offices of MQUP. I wondered about its life and death. I wondered too about the meaning of its posthumous existence inside a glass case.
.
The result is an elegy in the form of a monologue. I tried to recall and celebrate an extinct bird by giving it a voice. A quixotic ambition, I agree. But in the 21st century, isn’t poetry always quixotic?
.
A Labrador Duck
“Not seen since 1875. Presumed to be extinct.”
(handwritten label in the Redpath Museum, Montreal)
Presumed, indeed! It’s time you changed the label –
year upon year I watch it fading and withering,
a peculiar relic in your eyes
just as I am, posing in a glass box beside
a brace of passenger pigeons, each of us
a curiosity, a brief distraction
as you trudge from dinosaur to mummy.
Sixty of my kind, I hear, were spared
the usual fate of the dead. But I imagine
their feathers too are starting to disintegrate,
the cells in their bills dissolving despite
all your efforts to render us immortal.
It doesn’t work; it never works; one happy day
I expect to crumble. As for my previous life
there are many things I’m proud to say
you’ll never know – our habits of courtship,
our flyways and byways, why we had so little
chance against you – and I’m not telling.
Stop. Look me over, and please let me
indulge my only pleasure: looking back at you.
Now that feeding, flying, mating and diving
are impossible, the chance to ponder you
is all I’ve got. Call me an anthropologist,
alert to the coded meanings in your plumage,
the significance of tiny frowns. In yarmulkes
and bobby socks, Bermudas and chadors,
Paisley shirts and leather boots that hurt the floor,
you come and go, dying slowly on the stairs.
So here I stand: preserved and catalogued and webbed,
a trophy of your deadly skill, while you –
still free to taste the wind and weather,
peering in at me as though I had the answer
to some query on the tip of your tongue –
recede into the growing past.
From The Silver Palace Restaurant (MQUP, 2005)
Mark Abley is an editor and author of many books of poetry and non-fiction including Spoken Here, The Prodigal Tongue, and Conversations with a Dead Man. A recipient of a 2005 Guggenheim Fellowship, he lives in Montreal.
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