Glorious Height

Aug 12 2015

The window-washers

will never finish

their Sisyphean chore.

Circle the tower, then up a floor,

begin once more.

The gratification of squeaky clean

is small, but inexhaustible.

With an expert flick of the wrist

the squeegee glides, and twists

and corrals every drip

before it hits the sill,

leaving glass

that glitters and gleams.

A perpetual motion machine

50 stories high.

So self-satisfied bankers

can gaze out over the city

through floor-to-ceiling glass,

like the masters of the universe

they imagine themselves.

So the high-rise glistens

like liquid fire,

orange and gold

in setting sun.

A crystal fortress

of human pride.

A working man’s life,

dangling off a building

from 9 to 5.

Repeating the same practiced motion

with the same right hand.

Returning to the first window

when he’s done the last.

Ratchetting-up, and frictioning-down

in a futile race

to complete the task.

Looking-in

through tinted glass

at startled faces, looking back.

Or from Mt. Olympus, looking down

with grace, privilege, magic.

In the fabulous light, unearthly calm, above the clouds

on flawed and mortal man.

I think the poem pushes and pulls. There is the futility of a job that’s never done. And then there is the finality of finishing a window, the gratification of cleaning. There is the working grunt. And then there is the dignity of work. There is the repetitive and endless nature of the task. And then there is the lofty view, the privileged vantage point. There is something about human pride and solipsism. And then there is the flawed and mortal human condition.

On National Geographic’s Instagram feed, there was a picture of cleaners on the world’s tallest building (they never specified where or what it is, but Google tells me it’s the Burj Khalifa in Dubai). Apparently, there are 25,000 windows, and they never finish. It’s like painting a bridge:  once you’ve gotten to the end, the beginning needs painting again. So you will never see this building without window-washers dangling off of it. The work is never done. 

Kinship

Aug 7 2015

I want to believe

the stories of dolphins

who rescue ship-wrecked sailors.

Who materialize from the depths

like answered prayers,

holding them up

so they can breathe,

shepherding them to shore.

And envy the men

who rescue stranded whales,

beached, high and dry;

relentless sun

on virgin skin,

lungs, heaving under their weight.

How the urgency

to be of help

expands,

from family, to tribe, to stranger,

from fellow human being

to a wholly different species;

alien

as the cold dark sea

from which he comes.

Imagine that great glistening eye

looking back into mine.

Might I catch a glimpse

of the ineffable soul

in its soft brown depths?

And imagine standing beside

such a powerful creature,

so immense

and so improbably helpless.

Who consents to my touch

even welcomes it.

Will he feel gratitude?

Will he remember

his lifelong debt,

the collective memory

of our kindness to them

their kindness back?

And will he grasp the kinship

of life on earth,

fellow mammals

separated by millions of years,

intelligent beings

whose world-views

barely intersect?

As mysterious

as quantum physics,

as the concept of distance

measured in years of light,

is such a vast intelligence

without reading, or tools

fire, or hands.

How much we share, how much is alien,

and lacking language

to bridge the gap.

The self-awareness

of a social animal, like us.

And the precariousness

of the unarmed hunt,

taking whole animals, raw.

Who sings intricate songs

of longing, or love

across thousands of miles of ocean.

So sleek and fast

in his exo-planet

of unmapped sea,

while we are small, and weak

and too easily eaten.

So we haul water

and clamber over rocks

and console him with nonsense

in our soft terrestrial tongue.

Until the tide returns, and floats him off,

back to the welcoming sea

a grateful pod.

Did he pause, and take a long look back,

perplexed that these small angular animals

would take such care?

Wondering why a species

from another planet

would even bother,

when all he's known

is either family

or mortal threat.

And wishing we were smart enough to talk

and share with him

the wonders of life on land, survival in air;

what we feel, in common,

why we bothered to care.

In my daily paper, there have been two stories in the last few days about people rescuing beached whales. Perhaps it's a time of year when strandings are more common. Or perhaps some slow news days. Or perhaps, these are deeply moving stories, and command our attention.

I also recently heard a piece on Fresh Air (the NPR radio show, which I often download in podcast form) about dolphins. In particular, the interviewee related a remarkable anecdote about one of those almost mythological stories of dolphins rescuing human beings; except this wasn't myth, it was documented and unimpeachable.

(The poem is imprecise about just which animal, conflating dolphins and orcas and whales. Because not all cetaceans hunt, and not all are so tightly social. I think the story of the human rescue involved spinner dolphins, and one of the strandings was of killer whales.)

Anyway, in the news pieces, the rescuers interviewed all express awe and wonder at this privileged interaction; almost as if the experience was transformational. I, too, was deeply affected; even as just a reader. I think the context of a newspaper elevates the emotion even more: such acts seem even more selfless and altruistic and incomprehensible when set against the daily litany of all the evil humans do to one another, as well as to the planet. And the stories touch on the deep mystery of fellow feeling: of the kinship of all living things; of the deep longing to reach across the gap and understand a presumably equal but diametrically different intelligence.

According to the podcast, there is a small fringe group who earnestly -- if outlandishly -- believe that dolphins come from another planet: a truly exotic creature, a truly alien intelligence. Of course, life on earth is creative enough to come up with a lot more exotic creature that a mere dolphin; the extreme explanation is hardly called for. But in a way, the worldview of an intelligent underwater social animal who communicates by sonar, and that of an intelligent terrestrial social animal who communicates by written language and has hands and invents machines, are so diametrically different that they might just as well come from other planets. And I use just that imagery in the poem.

On the other hand, it's easy to be distracted by the differences while failing to be intrigued by the similarities: the ineffable kinship of mammals, of social animals, of highly intelligent beings.

So the poem alternates between these two perspectives. I think that's well illustrated by the jarring reference to both quantum physics and years of light. Because when you whipsaw between the outer limits of microcosm and macrocosm, you suddenly feel a lot closer to the fellow inhabitants of that infinitesimally narrow -- and far more comprehensible -- band where living things reside. And because none of us really understands quantum physics, no matter how much we fool ourselves; just as no one truly comprehends just how big a light year is. (Not to mention that the imagery of physics and light years also works well in the context of alien creatures and exo-planets.)

Ultimately, the poem has a hopeful message about reaching across the gap, about celebrating the commonalities and not the differences. ...Which could, of course, be equally applied to our fellow humans.

My favourite stanza is the 3rd last. I'm concerned that a lot of the preceding stuff is repetitive: that I'm saying much the same thing over again; that I'm not trusting the reader; that I'm getting lost in the weeds. While this stanza gets back to the narrative, the story-telling. And it shows it instead of saying it -- the cardinal rule of poetry. I also like the 3rd stanza, looking into his eye: ...that great glistening eye/ looking back into mine./ Might I catch a glimpse/ of the ineffable soul/ in its soft brown depths? And I like the inversion in the last stanza, taking the point of view of the whale, who is as mystified by us as we are by him. I hope the reader smiles at ...wishing we were smart enough to talk!

Ornaments

Aug 5 2015

The little bird

was ferocious, intense,

hurtling himself at the glass

again and again,

2 thin legs

strutting on the ledge

like David, calling-out Goliath.

Sun-dried crap

splatting the window

baked to aluminum.

Tiny pocks

from his short sharp beak.

A bird in spring,

claiming territory

taking-on rivals.

Furious

at his own reflection

taunting him back,

no time to feed

wired on testosterone.

The rustle of leaves, dappled light.

Flowers, on the cusp of bloom

compact and succulent.

And bird-song, like ornaments of sound.

Who knew

there was also madness, fever, urgent sex

behind the green façade

of this pastoral Eden?

A tiny bird, airily feathered and hollow-boned

who would drive in his beak, rat-a-tat-tat

peck out your eye,

if it weren't for the triple-pane glass

you flinch behind.

This happens frequently in spring: the window and ledge are a mess; the little bird is fierce and undeterred. I'm writing about it now (early August) because a short phrase caught my eye as I riffed through the articles in the most recent New Yorker.

All I saw in the microsecond before I scanned to the next page was this: a robin redbreast began hurling itself at a window. That's all it took to light me up with a flash of recognition! (Not to mention that this past spring there was also a determined woodpecker greeting each sunrise by persistently bashing on my downspout, presumably to make as fierce a noise as possible in order to intimidate his territorial rivals. (Although at first I figured the damned thing was merely brain-damaged, and somehow mistook aluminum for wood!))

I can't entirely explain my penchant for Biblical references. Here, there's David and Goliath, as well as Eden. Maybe it's a bit of subconscious mischief: an atheist quoting Scripture, just as the devil is reputedly able to do! Although the truth is that the cultural heritage of Judaism and Christianity belongs to all of us, not just believers.

Anyway, if a bird can have facial expression, this one did: angry, determined, to the death. Or more likely it was just his posture and relentlessness, and I inferred the face. When we hear bird-song, we imagine the beauty and benevolence of nature. But in reality, these little Napoleons are proclaiming territory, declaring acts of war. We have become so detached from nature, we tend to see it all as Disneyland.

(Here's the paragraph that began the story and contained that fateful phrase. (The article A Ghost in the Family, by Dana Goodyear, can be found at http://nyr.kr/1IKq9fh): Early on the morning I went to see the San Francisco artists Barry McGee and Clare Rojas at their weekend place, in Marin County, a robin redbreast began hurling itself at a window in their living room. “It won’t stop,” Rojas said. She picked up a sculpture of a bird from the inside sill to warn it off. When that didn’t work, Rojas instructed her fourteen-year-old daughter, Asha, to cut out three paper birds, which she taped to the window, as if to say: GO AWAY. “Can I let it in, Clare?” McGee asked gently. Absolutely not, Rojas answered. Thud. The bird hit the glass again, and their three dogs barked wildly.)

State of Matter

Aug 3 2015

The rain came down like ice picks.

As if hard enough to break skin,

and cold as the thin rarefied air

a mile up.

On a grey still day

of pelting rain

falling straight, and windless.

But under the surface

I felt protected, warm,

the summer heat

the lake still holds.

I slip beneath

and feel immune from the storm;

impervious skin, accustomed to wetness,

the body of water, a placid refuge

dense, and still.

Or resume my stroke

and feel the power of weather

the ocean of air.

Like a bracing spa;

from cold to hot,

chaotic, calm.

But even submerged

I hear the surface churn

the roiling fizz.

The quality of sound

in incompressible water

is almost material,

steady, substantial

an octave down.

And the lake, still as glass

but without the mirror shine.

As if the boundary line

between water and air

had dissolved.

A state of matter

that's indeterminate;

neither floating or falling,

solid, liquid, or gas.

Short sharp gasps

of atomized water, saturated air.

Making for land

I trust is there.

I love an open-water swim in the rain. In summer, when the lake is warm. I feel impervious in the downpour. The contrast between the chaos above and calm below is striking. I inhabit a water world, no matter what.

But this was no gentle rain. It was a hard cold pelting one: like needles, when my head came up for air. Still, there was the same sense of an indeterminate state, of a dissolution of boundaries, of a soft muddled monotony of light and sensation, of time suspended.

And the lake, fortunately, still retaining the heat of a few warm days: I mean it's Aug 3, and I'm still in a wetsuit?!!

Collecting Light

Aug 2 2015

Tonight was the night

I determined to count the stars.

But the longer I watched, they more they multiplied.

The darkness filled, and the weakest light

became more and more visible;

legion upon legion of stars

appearing in great promiscuous waves.

As if my eyes

were peeling back time,

telescoping deeper

into the cosmos.

Until I could no longer keep track.

So I simply lay on my back, looking up

at a sky dense with stars

awash in light;

as if infinity

were in my grasp.

When counting

no longer mattered

and I wondered how far I could go,

my dilating eyes

collecting the light

of falling stars, and satellites

and vast glowing nebulae.

In the clear crisp air

of a moonless night

the heavens were coldly ablaze.

And I was probing deeper and deeper,

riding the planet

hurtling through space.

There is something different about this poem. Maybe it’s the subject matter:  dangerously close to cliché; too damned easy and obvious. Or maybe my approach; which was just to say it, and not worry so much about compression, or artfulness, or misdirection. Or maybe it was that I didn’t work it so hard, didn’t endlessly revise, revisit, and revise: what you see is pretty much the first draft, with a few tweaks here and there.

 But whatever it is, it was satisfying to write, and seems to stand up well enough to the reading. I like the whimsy. I like the way it evokes the actual experience of taking in a starry night:  the way -- over time -- the sky rewards your patience, opening itself up like a revelation.

Stuffed

Aug 1 2015

The ripe stink

of its fetid breath, greasy fur

hits you like a head shot

even before you hear

the stomping in the underbrush

the low rumbling growl.

Before its brown hulk

appears like a blur

in your peripheral vision,

heart pounding

exquisitely alert.

But the stuffed specimen

in the wildlife exhibit

was a dusty rug, tossed over styrofoam.

The taxidermist's art

is all stillness, and surface,

the illusion, technically perfect

of a dispensable world;

wilderness

as Disneyland.

The bloodlessness

of hard glass eyes.

Before the Europeans

they emulated bears,

honoured their spirit

of courage, and strength.

To them, this simulacrum would be sacrilege,

a grave disrespect

to a fabulous creature's

noble death.

Stuffed trophies, mounted heads,

pictures posed

with dead animals.

The great hunter's high-powered bow

elephant gun.

The brown bear

who retreats to the canopy, recedes into trees

when she catches a whiff of men.

Gathers her cubs

and runs.

There was a brief uproar in the news the other day -- to be forgotten tomorrow, of course, as we inexorably move on to the latest distraction -- about some macho American big game hunter who shot a lion in Africa. He paid tens of thousands of dollars to be taken on this hunt. They baited the venerable male with a dead animal, lured it out of the protected park, wounded it with a bow, tracked it for almost 2 days, then -- finally -- fatally shot it. Its cubs will now be eaten by the next-in-line male, who will take over his pride of females and instinctively eliminate his competitor's genetic legacy. We know about this story because Cecil was a well-known and admired lion: he was old, and distinctively handsome; the frequent subject of photographs as one of the highlights for wilderness tourists in this wildlife refuge. He was also being collared and tracked for research. The hunter -- a dentist from the midwest -- has a proud record of rare trophy animals to his name. All the photos are there on the internet.

I have nothing but disdain and contempt for him. It's by definition an unfair fight. There is nothing macho about it. The only excuse for hunting is subsistence. Doing it for bloodlust and a trophy is despicable. A dentist from the midwest ....hmmm, over-compensating?!!

A few pages later, in the same newspaper, there was a piece about a road trip in Kananaskis country, in the Alberta foothills. Among the illustrations was a picture of a stuffed grizzly bear. The conflation of these two things resulted in this poem.

Although it's about brown bears, not grizzlies. Because the gratuitous killing of a brown bear is unacceptable: while a grizzly will aggressively confront humans, the natural instinct of a brown bear (except for the odd rogue male, or for a starving, habituated, or rabid one) is to run. When they evolved, North America was populated by sabre-tooth tigers, giant grizzlies. In this milieu, the brown bear was a prey animal, not a predator; he survived by stealth and flight, not aggression.

I had some trouble being politically correct, and came up with this: Before the Europeans/ they emulated bears. So the word they conveniently saves me from such incorrect or unwieldy terms as "Indian", "aboriginal", and "First Nations". ...I quite like elephant gun. Not only does it set up a nice rhyme that cinches the ending tight, it so economically implies overkill, the grossly unfair advantage of technology. And it jumps out even more by incongruity, vertiginously jerking the reader in a single word from familiar North America to the dark heart of Africa. ...great hunter, of course, is said ironically: I hope you can feel the sneer as you say it. ...And I like the way the sense of smell brackets the poem: I think the inversion -- from us smelling and fearing the bear to the bear smelling and fearing us -- becomes a way into the bear's experience, a vehicle for empathy. Not to mention that the call-back brings the poem full circle, giving it a satisfying sense of completion. ...And I must apologize to my hypothetical bear: I suspect they groom far too meticulously to have greasy fur. I just couldn't resist its richly evocative potential: a single word that evokes all 3 sense -- touch, sight, smell.

(A couple days later, I came across this column by Tony Keller in the Globe and Mail. Exactly right! A few days after that, an editorial, and then Margaret Wente's column. As usual, she cuts through the emotion and immediacy, and gets to the nub. Here they are, in order: 

‘Dr. Palmer, why did you kill Ce­cil?’

'The Globe and Mail Metro (Ontario Edition)' - 2015-07-31

TONY KELLER tkeller@globe­and­mail.com

On Wednesday, the Minneapolis Star Tribune website featured a photo of 10-year-old Piper Hoppe, sitting on the steps of Walter Palmer’s dental clinic. She was part of a small group of protesters, and she was carrying a sign with a photograph of Cecil the lion. Around his image, the girl had written in brightly coloured Magic Marker: “Dr. Palmer, why did you kill Cecil?”

That is a very good question. It is also the essential question. Not whether he had the appropriate permits, or followed local bylaws, or lured a lion out of a protected area or knew Cecil was a revered part of a research project. No, the fundamental question is this: Why kill something for the sake of killing it? What kind of person finds pleasure in that?

Last week, a female orca was discovered at low tide in Hartley Bay, B.C., trapped on the rocks. If the whale remained stranded and in the sun for even a short time, she would die. She was making distress calls, probably to her family nearby. Volunteers rushed to the scene, covered her in blankets and for hours doused her with saltwater to keep her cool, all the while trying to calm and soothe her. When the tide rose, the whale’s five-tonne body became buoyant and she was able to swim to safety. People on the scene, interviewed after the fact, expressed wonder at what they had seen and satisfaction at what they had done. The life of a living, breathing, feeling creature had been saved.

The day after he was revealed as the man who had killed Cecil, Walter Palmer issued a statement. “I deeply regret that my pursuit of an activity I love and practise responsibly and legally resulted in the taking of this lion.” Consider his words: “An activity I love.” So what exactly is this “activity?”

It is seeking out something rare and beautiful and alive – and killing it. It is searching for this beautiful thing not for the joy of being awestruck at its existence, but to be able to say that you ended its life. It is the worst of the human impulses, which is in each of us: the impulse to destroy and to glory at the destruction we have wrought.

Death comes to all, eventually. What’s upsetting is not that a lion has died. What’s disturbing is that there are people, like the Minnesota dentist, for whom the greatest enjoyment in life is to fly across the world and pay huge sums of money for the pleasure of killing something, posing smilingly for pictures with the freshly dispatched creature and then proudly posting a careful accounting of the kill to websites dedicated to keeping score. He was not hunting for food or self-defence. There’s no defence of necessity or even utility. The killing is as senseless as can be.

What virtue – what of that which is best in humanity – is exemplified by a guy who shoots a tame lion and then congratulates himself with a selfie? Do you want to be the person who saved the whale, or the person who killed Cecil? Who would you like your neighbours to be? Who would you like your child to grow up to be?

Imagine if there were people who fantasized about, say, destroying famous works of art. The more rare and precious, the better. Their dream would be to go to the Louvre, the Maasai Mara of the art world, and torch a Monet or set fire to a Dutch Master, or open fire on Michelangelo from 100 metres. They’d be willing to pay handsomely to practise the activity they love. And you and I would consider them to be sociopaths.

Dr. Palmer has shot down all sorts of creatures all around the world – a leopard, rhino, elk and on and on. He would appear to have devoted his life savings to killing rare animals. The activity he loves, and he is hardly the only one, is the bringing of violent death to other living things. Again, this isn’t hunting for food. It is killing because it’s fun to kill. There’s nothing else to it.


~~~~~~~~~~~~

The sad­dest selfie ever

'The Globe and Mail Metro (Ontario Edition)' - 2015-08-01

The brutal death of a beautiful animal fills most people with sadness and disgust. It is an undeniably human response to be repelled by violence and cruelty, but there is something especially disturbing about the killing of Cecil, a dark-maned Zimbabwean lion, that has generated worldwide grief and despair.

Cecil lived in Zimbabwe’s protected Hwange National Park, and his effortless leonine magnificence was a big tourist draw. In our market-based economy, he had considerably more value as a living exhibit than as the dead carcass he became after being lured outside the park and hunted down in a perverted version of sport by Walter Palmer, an American dentist who paid $50,000 for the thrill.

But the fundamental reason Cecil is being mourned is because he so perfectly expressed the awesomeness of existence in ways we can barely articulate or appreciate until we see a lion in his habitat, living the life he was made to live – before money, human arrogance and a twisted sense of pleasure turned this wonder of creation into a pathetic trophy, the saddest selfie ever.

A death like this leaves a huge void, because the imbalance between the corpse and the killer is so extreme: It shouldn’t be this easy to extinguish the planet’s greatness just to satisfy one demented tourist’s need for self-glorification. The trivial indifference to life glimpsed in the dentist’s dumbstruck souvenir photos, where extraordinary creatures are nullified and transformed into deferential props, fuels the outrage. There is a war-crime feeling about this whole experience, even if the Geneva Convention will never apply – how bloodless and uncaring do you need to be to slaughter highly evolved creatures on this scale, celebrate yourself doing it, and feel no shame?

Few people, thankfully, feel a powerful urge to kill an animal simply because it is rare and beautiful and has a beating heart. Those who take pleasure in violence and the suffering of others are rightly regarded as sociopaths, and one of the great markers of our erratic progress as humans is that we’ve managed to extend the sense of empathy beyond the family and the tribe to those who are not like us – up to and including the king of beasts.

Cruelty to animals is now recognized as a basic sign of inhumanity. Just as we don’t wallow in public executions or exhibit our dead enemies’ heads on pikes at the edge of town, we don’t bait bears for pleasure on the street or skin cats just because we can. When star football player Michael Vick was revealed to be running a dog-fighting ring in 2007, incomprehensibility almost superseded disgust – few people could believe such archaic brutality existed in the modern world, let alone that a sports celebrity could find pleasure in it.

Most of the time when we talk about human progress, we get it wrong – we’re not better than the thinkers and the doers who preceded us, as much as we want to believe that medical discoveries and technological breakthroughs have made us superior beings.

But in our relationship with other animals, we have developed a compassion and a capacity to co-exist that truly makes us better than our narrow-minded ancestors. Of course, it’s imperfect: We find ways to override these evolving instincts, and it isn’t always convincing to say we’re humane enough to call out our inconsistencies. But the idea that pleasure could be derived from harming a living creature for sport or fun has become intolerable in most societies. The harmonious paradise of the biblical Genesis was a distant and unworldly ideal that after thousands of years has become an ecological model. Whatever lions are in relation to humans, they are not our enemy, let alone our trophy.

And yet inexplicably the torturing continues, masked under manly names like sport-hunting or trophy-hunting. When we’re faced with outbreaks of such atavistic barbarity in the modern world, a gross violation of what ought to be a universal value of respect, we’re properly horrified and disgusted. What’s bad for animals is equally bad for us.

We know much better than our ancestors that lions are wonderfully complex social beings – Cecil was being studied by Oxford researchers at the time of his killing. Victorian big-game hunters at least could feign ignorance for the callous suffering they perpetrated as they decorated their castles with the hacked-off heads of their feline victims and elephant-foot umbrella stands. But in the 21st century, killing a lion or tiger for sport should be seen as an extreme act that is beyond justification, unless you’re Vladimir Putin and don’t have to answer to anyone. And then you’re just a bully, with a lot of dead animals looking up to you.

Trophy hunters tie themselves in knots trying to justify their deadly pastime as a tradition, a necessity, a supreme test of courage, a rejection of urban softness and a reality check on meat-eating modernity’s smooth hypocrisies. But their rhetoric is a distraction from harsher truths.

Our historical relationship with animals is indeed complicated, and no one would pretend that we’ve got it right when we lavish love on our cats and dogs and then look away when People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals posts a video of an abattoir’s casual horrors.

But at least we know enough, and care enough, to feel shame. A trophy hunter, posing with the subservient corpse of a rhino or leopard or lion, takes pride as well as pleasure in ending the lives of these glorious beings. The photos, testifying to the killer’s need for power and dominance, are reminiscent of the Islamic State’s need for endless beheadings: Behold my power, behold my victims. The sense of misguided supremacy is disturbingly similar.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Death of a lion king: Who’s the vil­lain?

'The Globe and Mail Metro (Ontario Edition)' - 2015-08-01

MAR­GARET WENTE mwente@globe­and­mail.com

Margaret Wente says the real villain is the international poaching trade

Hunting for sport is revolting, but Africa’s animals are being wiped out by criminal gangs who fund their wars with blood ivory

Big game hunter Walter Palmer is now on the endangered species list. The Minnesota dentist who killed Cecil has gone to ground, with millions of enraged animal lovers in hot pursuit. If he’s smart he’ll stay there for a while. Plenty of people think lynching is too good for him. They think he should be shot with a crossbow, tracked while he’s in agony and decapitated. Or he deserves some dental surgery, without an anesthetic.

I don’t blame them, really. Crime or no crime, Mr. Palmer’s taste in hobbies is revolting.

But he isn’t the real villain of the piece. Trophy hunters are often conservationists as well. They usually care about animal sustainability. (Mr. Palmer once paid $45,000 U.S. to help preserve elk habitat.) The enormous sums they pay to bag exotic animals makes local people more likely to protect them, since the animals are now a lucrative natural resource. The real villains are the poachers, who are wiping out Africa’s most magnificent beasts on a massive sale.

Last year, poaching syndicates wiped out a record 1,215 rhinos in South Africa alone. Their horns are exported to the Far East and ground up for traditional medicine, where they fetch far more than their weight in gold. In Mozambique, the last remaining rhinos were slaughtered two years ago.

The lions are in trouble, too, mostly because of habitat loss and conflicts with humans. A century ago, an estimated 200,000 lions roamed across Africa, according to National Geographic. Today, there are fewer than 30,000. The real danger to the lions is human population growth, which, in Africa, continues to explode.

Elephant poaching seems unstoppable. In just three years, 100,000 have been slaughtered for their tusks, which will be turned into ivory trinkets for Asia’s aspirational new middle class. Two-thirds of the elephants in Tanzania’s Selous Game Reserve, once home to the largest concentration of elephants in the world, have been wiped out. In Zimbabwe’s Hwange National Park – where Cecil lived – poachers killed more than 300 elephants by poisoning their watering holes with cyanide. It was the largest single elephant massacre yet documented.

The elephant world had its own Cecil. He was a majestic bull elephant named Sateo. Poachers killed him last year in Kenya, where he was a national icon. His image had been widely used in save-the-elephant campaigns. Park rangers kept him on special watch because they knew he was a target. But when he wandered too close to the park’s borders, poachers shot him with a poisoned arrow. To get at his magnificent tusks, they hacked off his face.

Poverty is one factor that drives poachers to kill. But it is by no means the major one. Many of the poaching rings are organized by international criminal gangs and abetted by corrupt government officials. The trade in “blood ivory” helps to fund war and terror throughout Africa, according to a recent report on the link between poaching and conflict issues. The civil war in the Central African Republic is partly funded by ivory, as is Nigeria’s Islamist terrorist group Boko Haram. In South Sudan, both sides in the conflict fund their wars with ivory. Twenty five years ago, South Sudan’s elephant population was 130,000. Today, there are only 5,000 left. As Varun Vira, the report’s co-author, told the New Scientist, “The modern ivory trade was built on war.”

Are you angry yet? You should be.

In the race between the poachers and the beasts, right now the poachers are winning. Yet, there’s good news. Our sensibilities toward animals have undergone a moral revolution, and so has our desire to protect them. Wanton killing, once regarded as good sport, now sickens us. This is something utterly new in the history of humankind, which has never had a problem hunting entire species to extinction. Mammoths, sabre-tooth tigers and giant beavers once roamed North America. Then, some time after humans arrived, they died out. What did them in? Scientists are arguing about that. It could have been a comet, climate change, hunting or a combination thereof, but it’s likely that humans were involved. The last of the great auks was sighted off Newfoundland in 1852. The moa – the large flightless birds of New Zealand – were extinguished by the Maori shortly after they arrived around 1300. In North America, both native Americans and Europeans were responsible for mass buffalo slaughters. The buffalo, which once blotted out the land during migration season, were reduced by the 1880s to a few hundred animals. Of all the predators, humans are the biggest predator of all.

Today, mass slaughter shocks the conscience of at least part of the world. We now believe it’s wrong to wipe out creatures that can’t protect themselves. They have a right to their existence, just as we do. The real Cecil, of course, would not hesitate to claw you to death and eat you if he had a chance. But most us don’t live in conflict with lions any more. They are not about to snatch our livestock or our kids. They deserve to live in peace.

The real solution to this slaughter is not to outlaw hunting. It’s to disrupt the criminal gangs that fund their wars and terror with blood ivory. It’s to lean on African governments to crack down on corruption, and to give local people a stake in animal protection. It’s to find ways to change the Asian culture of ivory worship. All of that is hard, but perhaps not impossible if people care enough.

Meanwhile, please go see these magnificent creatures for yourself. It will help to save them. And it will be one of the most amazing experiences you will ever have.)

Granularity

July 31 2015

Too close, and all I see

are subtle tones
and brush-strokes

and heavy impasto.

The canvas weave

bleeding through

the neutral undercoat.

I feel my eyes converge

vision blur.

Unknown worlds

I cannot resolve.

The fine grain

that gets finer and finer;

orders of magnitude, all the way down.

Or step back, and back again.

The big picture

in its gilded frame

on a plain beige wall.

In an airy room

in a glass-enclosed gallery.

On a minor planet

around an average sun

in a typical spiral galaxy.

The artist

has rendered a tropical sea,

stock-still

in its infinitesimally thin

slice of time.

And I am a grain of sand

on a vast sweep

of virgin beach.

Tide encroaches, surf climbs,

the crash of waves

the smell of brine.

And in my mind's eye

the long before

and certain after.

The primordial rock

that was ground down

to fine brown sand.

And in the fullness of time

will be swamped

and washed away.

The water planet, monochrome blue,

set against

the black canvas

of deep space.

I find myself returning to this imagery and theme: the idea of orders of magnitude as parallel universes, mutually oblivious. We comfortably inhabit ours, and find it impossible to wrap our heads around the microscopic and sub-atomic, the inter-galactic and infinitely large. Here, the perspective applies not only to space, but time as well. I wanted to verbally whip-saw the reader, microscoping in and telescoping out.

A recently popular -- and inevitably over-used -- expression has been "granularity": meaning to focus in and see the fine grain of things, the fundamentals. In the poem, I take the metaphor and use it literally. So granularity becomes an actual grain of sand. And the centre-piece is an actual painting, which disappears into a blur as you get too close; and then disappears into insignificance as you step away.

This is where, I'm afraid, my abiding nihilism enters the piece: the narrator is a puny speck of sand in an indifferent universe; the inevitable end is an insignificant death. And I guess the final stanza represents the ultimate annihilation of climate change and sea-level rise: the blue-and-green marble earth of that famous NASA photograph has turned monochrome blue. ...Or not. Because poems, of course, are not prescriptive and linear: the reader is free to understand it in any way she likes, and I keenly invite any and all idiosyncratic readings.

It's remarkable how much meaning the human mind can confer on a still image. So despite the moving image, 3-D technology, and immersive computer simulations, not only does the basic art of painting persist, but classic works are still just as loved and highly valued. In the poem, the viewer enters into the painting, and her imagination weaves a complete narrative from the single stop-action frame.

I'm amazed by the craft and virtuosity when I see a painting in close-up like this: how what seems to be a crude application of pigment resolves into something so life-like and fully realized as you step away, or as the camera pans back. I couldn't even begin to do what the most basic artist can. And my apparent expertise is just that -- apparent. I may have picked up specialized terms like impasto and undercoat; but really, the best I can do is crude stick figures in crayon!