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The Legal Studies Forum
Volume 30, Number 1/2 (2006) reprinted by permission Legal Studies Forum Lawyers & Poets A World Inhabited ANN TWEEDY _______________________ nature essay did you know, if you have a yard in the right climate, it's probably patrolled by one male hummingbird? like the god who knows every hair on your head, this bird has memorized each flower in your yard, including the precise times at which their nectar cups fill up. in this way, he can manage his realm (and his sugar fixes) efficiently. when he's not busy drinking, he catches insects and defends your yard against intruder hummingbirds. so, if, like most americans, you harbor many secret fears, one of which is being overrun, you can delete that one. female hummingbirds, by contrast, tend to lay low so as not to rile their touchy counterparts. their reasons to survive are bigger than whatever charge they'd get from gorging on nectar cups. many different conclusions could be drawn. for one, it seems clear that the image of the hummer with its long beak buried in a trumpet like flower is indeed phallic. another is that, for the benefit of survival, it is sometimes necessary to weigh the costs of pleasure carefully. finally, you might apprehend that you do not really own your property: some hummingbird probably has an equally valid claim and knows it more intimately. [615]
vanishing hoof prints in the northeast corner of washington and the northern tip of idaho, thirty mountain caribou wander the selkirk range, crossing back and forth to canada. they eat witch's hair or old man's beard—lichens that hang from the dense, old growth canopy. they are shy, so hardly anyone sees them; only a few more know of them. now the whir of snowmobiles interrupts their quiet trek through once hushed whiteness. their snowshoe hooves are becoming useless. as you read this, insatiable logging companies dismantle the remaining canopy— trucks rattle mountain roads, pronged flat beds waiting for corpses that took two hundred years to grow. biologists predict the selkirk caribou will "wink out" like city lights during a black out. like gamblers who have put down their last bucks, we'll watch, transfixed, as thirty dwindle to zero. even stewards concede it's not tenable to close the forests to snowmobiles, to stop logging. they grasp what you and i may not: someone, somewhere, did a calculation— [616]
logging and recreation beat out species preservation. [617]
harvest two weeks ago workers picked budded daffodils, bound them into bouquets, loaded them on trucks. a few bunches fell in road- side grass and lay there conjuring all the wasted treasures. now, i pass those same bouquets again, flowers fully opened, blooming at nothing. [618]
half life home for the yearly visit in february i sit with you in the rented car in the dirt driveway that travels from one end of the lot to the other. already the house is so near to falling down that you won't let me in and you won't leave the half acre yard for fear that someone will break in. somewhere beyond a daughter's jurisdiction, doctors weave scientific labels through the spokes of mystery. if i could read about my mother in words indifferent as steel instruments, would i feel more or less that i exist? so far, the only names i know belong to the ones you blame. Chris Barns is writing a book about me—if he calls you tell me. i get $1,000 for every privacy violation. i know you've talked to Mark Kraus; didn't he call you yesterday? Harold Johns put him up to trying to take my house away. do you know what terror is? imagine waking up near 30 to realize your mother has always been insane if you could reclaim the psyche, what colors would you shade perception in? the pictures i like best are black and whites of a dark haired girl in a pale dress. girl with a doll, girl with a puppy. maryjanes with white socks and a background of grass. her face turned slightly, the girl half smiles at the camera. it's that mixture of willingness and caution i believed in [619]
Events Leading up to an Afterlife Meeting Between Terri Schiavo and Manadal al Jamadi the woman who committed a kind of extended suicide clings to life in a hospice, her feeding tube removed, after state courts and federal courts refused to intervene. fifteen years earlier, while the eating disorder ravaged her, before it stopped her heart and killed her brain, she might have been savable. the president who flew home early from his texas ranch to sign the legislation that gave the federal courts jurisdiction to review the state court's life support decision is the same man whose navy seals and CIA officers beat an iraqi war prisoner near death with fists and gun muzzles, then shackled him to the wall, palestinian style, to die of complications. Manadal al Jamadi went from "ghost prisoner" to ghost in less than an hour, a flexibility that demonstrates the advantages of "ghost prisoner" status. and so a white woman in a self induced vegetative state, who didn't want to be on life support but whom our government nonetheless sought to forcibly keep alive, and an arab man, taken prisoner by our country and immediately murdered by our soldiers, both take off, maybe to the same place, to face whatever's next, leaving us with our silence. [620]
Ann Tweedy grew up in a small town in Massachusetts. She has been writing poetry since she moved to the West Coast in 1996 to attend law school at Boalt Hall. Her poems have appeared (or are forthcoming) in Clackamas Literary Review, Rattle, Avocet, Harrington Lesbian Fiction Quarterly, Berkeley Poetry Review, The Awakenings Review and other journals. For her day job, she works as a lawyer for an Indian tribe in rural Washington. "nature essay" was first published in Rattle (as part of their "Tribute to Lawyer Poets"); "vanishing hoof-prints" first appeared in The Pedestal Magazine; "harvest" previously appeared in Sqajet, and "half life" was in The Awakenings Review; "Events Leading Up to an Afterlife Meeting Between Terri Schiavo and Manadal Al jamadi" was first published in New News Verse. |
