Three Poems
Gilbert Klapper
Poetry Evening
Mockingbirds, not Finches
Everyone used to think it was the finches
that caused a
but he bungled the finches, thinking
some were warblers and wrens
on the different islands of Los Encantadas.
A
his collections showed 13 species of finch.
But he could not use this as evidence
in his great book, because he did not
label from which islands they came.
It was in the mockingbirds that he saw
the difference on the different islands
and labeled them accordingly.
If these proved to be separate species,
he wondered how could they have
developed on islands in sight of each other
if not by transmutation. If they were indeed separate,
the notion of the stability of species would be undermined,
he wrote on the way back to
In
him the mockingbirds were different species too.
That fact opened the floodgates that
drowned special creation, at least
for
Early Morning Matters
[or What Does It Matter?]
I am slaving away
writing about long extinct
microscopic teeth.
Thousands of fossils
collected in the Kimberleys
of
five expeditions to that desert.
And now years later I am trying
to bring the fossils back to life.
And to do so requires
a huge effort
starting each morning
before the dawn awakens.
To finish this opus
shunts aside the concerns
of family and friends.
Because I am trapped
long hours
arguing my views
with other researchers,
some who were friends,
others who were enemies,
now departed.
Here I am
buried under a pile
of their papers,
while the world spins
evermore into chaos.
And what do these
fossils matter?
An Arctic Summer - 1971
In a tent near Sör
Fiord on
in the Canadian
our only contact with the outside world
was the Piper that flew in once each week
with provisions from geological base camp
on
We cooked on a Coleman and I made omelettes
for my Canadian colleague, who shaved every morning
saying in his originally English accent
“one musn’t let oneself go to seed in the field.”
I responded by growing a beard which I wear to this day.
I trudged behind him through the muskeg,
a mile to reach the mouth of the unnamed canyon
we called the Sör Fiord site.
In three weeks we measured 4000 feet of Devonian limestone --
as we measured farther up the canyon,
it meant the walk from camp lengthened,
finally totaling four miles each way.
We made two round trips each day,
eagerly filling backpacks with Devonian corals
and limestone to dissolve for microfossils.
I stumbled back to camp through the slush of the muskeg
with the memory of Liszt’s Norma paraphrase
pulsing through my head.
Before leaving
but this was before Walkmans, which anyway failed on later excursions.
.
Nearly till the end, the weather held crisp and clear,
probably in the fifties so that we were sweating in down parkas.
The sun never set, streaming through the light-colored tent
allowing reading until late at “night.”
I had three paperbacks: a translation of Faust,
poems of Hopkins, and The Painted Bird.
Could not grasp the first two,
but stumbled halfway through human agony in the Polish countryside
[tried during a later field season
in the northern
We saw little life: gulls nesting in cliffs, occasional Arctic terns,
only a few sluggish mosquitoes,
and dwarf trees at ground level in the muskeg.
The silence of Sör Fiord, broken rarely
by the cry of gulls, since never regained.