Cock

Chile, 1834

A month before his dinner with the visiting Spanish lawyer,

he had “set out for the purpose of geologizing,”

and rode back over the ridge of the Chilecauquen

with a huge jute bag of living shells

from the sandy flats at the coast, and with another,

as full, of dead barnacles scraped from the rock.

A few months forward from that dinner

—on the island of San Pedro, where the Beagle was anchored

awaiting him—he would be sneaking up on a fox

“of a kind very rare” and donking it stoutly

“on the head with my geological hammer.” (The fox,

he’ll write, “is now in the Zoological Society.”)

So what does he think, when the Spanish lawyer expresses a disbelief

that the King of England would be so loco as to bother

to ship to this sensible, orderly country a man

“to pick up beetles and lizards, and to break stones”?

No, the whiff of something “off ”—like suspect meat—attends

eccentric stunts like these. “I do not like it:

if one of us were to go and do such things in England,

do not you think the King of England would very shortly

command us to leave his shores?” Renous,

another student of bugs and rocks, from Germany,

is also there at dinner, and he mentions then

that once, in a house in San Fernando, he’d been discovered

contemplating the transformation of caterpillars to butterflies.

He couldn’t deny it: there they were,

the writhing green proof, in an open box!

“The Padres and the Governor consulted, and agreed

it must be some heresy”—and so Renous was arrested.

Darwin can only shake his head in a quiet bemusement

as his guests converse. Those inchling creatures

crawling over their chopped-up foliage, heads as blunt

as thimbled thumbs . . . heretical? How

could anybody believe that the innocent jumble

in the baskets and flasks of a naturalist is dangerous?

*

And Lillian Colton—the woman in Owatonna,

Minnesota who for forty years has avidly collected

the seeds of that state and, with them (“poking them

into place with toothpicks and gluing them down”),

has portraitured “American presidents,

movie stars, country musicians, rock and roll legends,

scientific and religious leaders (including Mother Teresa)”

—what suspiciousness might seize the Spanish lawyer

if he saw her on her rounds? What edgy wariness

would grip him if he chanced on Nellie Staves,

“at 87 perhaps the most famous Adirondack trapper,”

out in the summer to harvest shell-shaped fungus

off the dead trees of those shaded, spinous hills?

—she’ll work for twenty hours straight on one,

with the point of an old school compass, stippling it

into the scene of a great alert-eyed ram

or a sunrise, watching as the fungus’s own interior,

brown juices dye the image into permanence.

Who would these represent, for the Spanish lawyer, what

forbidden Other?—a girl in the corner, walling her attention

away from her sisters’ strident hip-hop, by reading

a fanciful tale of witches? a girl on a dancer pole

at Sturgis, strobing her tits for the boys in a quick 1-2-1

semaphore of fuck-the-work-week revelry? Surely

not. Surely these are no threat to his world. And yet

for nothing more than positing a newly ordered

sky map, Giordano Bruno was led in chains

from his cell in the Roman prison of Castel San’Angelo, there

where he’d spent eight years as the Inquisition hammered

at his ideas and his calm resolve. It was February 19th,

1600; he was tied to an iron stake; a wedge

was stuffed in his mouth, to prevent any final

utterance of blasphemy; and he was burned alive.

The leg skin bubbled off of his body like a Christmas pig’s.

It turns out that a redone sky implies

a redone God—and a God is intolerant of this,

a God is jealous of any counter claim to the pedigree

of His cosmos. Yes, but . . . surely not

this mushroom picker? not this boy who simply speaks

to invisible friends as he wanders around the alleys?

Oh but that would depend on the given Spanish lawyer

of that given day and circumstance. In Ghent,

a cock was put on trial and sentenced to death

for repeatedly disturbing the peace of the Lord’s day,

Sunday. It had been warned; so now

it was just, to lead this beast to a chopping block

—restoring the sanctified order.

*

Kansas, 2004

Ah, for a witty transition from “cock”

to my neighbors Suzette and Edie!—lesbians, now

in love with each other for over a decade and wanting

only to declare their love in a marriage vow,

“like anyone,” as Edie says. Not that

my schoolboy humor would find favor

in their reading life . . . although we get along;

some shared affinity enables The Church

of the Gay Girls and The Orthodox Congregation of Guy

to coexist with an amiability. Still, I’ve witnessed

other people pass them by with the slitted,

ophidian stare of xenophobia. Suzette and Edie

—are they the new apostasy? are they our own

Anne Hutchinson? In 1638 she was found guilty,

after a two-day trial, of heresy—of being “a woman

not fitt for our Society.” With will, she had embraced

doctrinal misinterpretations, “some of them blasphemus, others

erroneus and all Unsafe, and of the Devill of Hell,”

and she was excommunicated from Massachusetts Bay Colony

“evermore.” Her actual crime?—a claim

“the Holy Spirit illumines the heart of every true believer”

without the need of a minister intervening.

For this, she was harried into the wilds

—it was called a “hiving-out”—and set at the mercy of wolf

and of winter, “and it were Death to return.” Her other

actual crime?—that after a pregnancy, she had been delivered

“of thirtie monstrus Births or therabowts at once,

some of them Bigger, some Lessr, some of one shape,

some of An other, few of any Perfect shape, None at all of them

of Human shape”—which perhaps is what you’d expect

from a woman of “nimble Witt and active Spirit and verie

Voluble Tonggue.” At the Republican convention,

it was, indeed, the voluble tongue that Edie always flapped

so saucily (and too, I’d guess, her rainbow-hue

WE’RE ALREADY BEDDED . . . WHY NOT WEDDED? T-shirt)

that (on her side) led inevitably to the violence.

A surly officer suggested that she move. She pointed out

how she was already in the caged-off square

allowed for free-speech protest, and had no intention

of leaving. There were “gestures they exchanged”. . . and then

a stun gun’s 50,000 volts were suddenly alive inside her,

just enough to crumple her into helplessness so that,

when the panic began, she was trampled by friends and police

alike. A lung was crushed, and when I visited

three weeks later, her skin was still a nightmare

Turkish rug of bruise. (For a moment, I saw in the air

around her the first disabling gust of snow in the woods

at the border of Massachusetts Bay in 1638.) To be fair,

I should add that the confrontational officer doing crowd control

went home with his head little more

than a pocket of blood and neural damage. Do not,

I warn you, ever lightly cross a Wiccan bowler.

*

Terms I haven’t yet used, from my pile of notes:

separatist, sedition, dogma. Finally, though, when those clouds

of abstraction open up, it’s always one specific

ordinary rainy day, in Chicago, in 1961. I’m thirteen,

squeaky-voiced, and with an adam’s apple popping

from my thin throat like a doorknob—while my father is large,

he fought the neighbor’s crazy German shepherd

to a standstill once, and behind him are generations of him,

solemn and knowing. We’re standing there

in front of the house, in a dim autumnal downpour,

and it wouldn’t look to anyone else like an even match,

my scrawny shouts, his thousands of years of righteousness;

and yet, in emotional terms, I have the upper hand.

I won’t believe in his God. I won’t believe

in any God, in any synagogue, in any mumbo jumbo

or rabbinical teetotum, and I’m screaming this

and screaming this and screaming this, until I see

the rain become his face, and for the only time

except his mother’s funeral on a similar day

of wet and chill in a shivering mix,

my father cries in front of me.

And God, if He’s there, must write my name down

on a list that He’ll turn over to His deputies on Earth

—His Spanish lawyers.

There are many terms for this,

but only one rain. Now it’s falling, grayish twill,

on a hill along the coast of the Chonos Archipelago islands.

1835. A mound of seals in the distance, “huddled together,

asleep: they appeared to be of a loving disposition;

but even pigs would be ashamed of their dirt,”

which is picked at by the turkey-buzzards. Terns,

gulls, black-necked swans. A deposit of sandstone.

“Four great snowy cones” of the local volcanoes.

He couldn’t be happier. He has computed the number of eggs

in a tenth-of-an-inch of a sea-slug’s potent slime,

he has suggested how “a great volume might be written,

describing one of these beds of sea-weed.” The otter.

The spunky Chilean mouse. He has read

“a most interesting discussion on the history

of the common potato.” He couldn’t be more mesmerized

in the grand salons of Paris than here, in the rain,

with his sodden insect net. And who

would complain? He isn’t any rooster. He isn’t

going to rudely wake anyone from a long sound sleep.