Thomas R. Smith on “Zebra Mussel” and “The Cecropia Cocoon”
Both of my poems in this issue, “Zebra Mussel” and “The Cecropia Cocoon,” are intentionally discomfort-inducing. While it’s true that, as Donald Hall has perceptively noted, energy in the poem can be generated by setting formal pleasure at odds with non-pleasurable content, I think that the energy in these two poems, such as it is, proceeds from a moral anguish born of our failure to protect the environment and an accompanying dread of the price coming due just a little farther down the road.
I had read about zebra mussels for years before actually experiencing them at a northern Minnesota lake a few summers ago. At one beach swimmers were advised to wear water shoes to protect their feet from the slashing edges of these tiny creatures’ shells, which were everywhere. And while the zebra mussels were ubiquitous, there was almost nothing else living in that water, so thoroughly had the mussels scoured the lake bottom. If there’s a larger point this poem is trying to make, it arrives in the last few lines: “My heart becomes a wet stone / sinking in dismay at how one / so small can desolate its world.” When you consider how minute we humans truly are in relation to the planet, it’s perfectly OK with me if you choose to substitute accordingly.
Human beings of course must own some agency in the spread of the zebra mussel and other invasive species. None of these species, though, can compare with our own for sheer global destructiveness. At the center of “The Cecropia Cocoon” is a truly nauseating moment of culpability which I hoped the poem might at least symbolically expiate. It’s our moments of unconsciousness that ultimately do us in no matter how responsibly aware we try to be the rest of the time. I’ve usually found that the small and specific detail provides the most accessible doorway into larger, otherwise overwhelming concerns—in this way, the sticky mess in the jar in our back entry led relentlessly to the problem of our continuing careless abuse of the planet, now demonically ramped up by the most nakedly anti-environmentalist president in our lifetime. I should mention that in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek Annie Dillard tells the story of a magnificent Polyphemus moth hatched in a schoolroom jar that didn’t allow enough space for its wings to properly unfold. This pathetically thwarted creature traumatized the young Dillard and has haunted my imagination as well, no doubt lending my Cecropia story an added jolt of horror by association.
As I point out in my forthcoming prose book Poetry on the Side of Nature (Folded Word Press), the “secret” subject of nature poetry is often—and increasingly—the felt distance between the poet and his or her subject. In “Zebra Mussel” I attempt through empathy to close the distance I feel between myself and the mussel, though with limited success; my sense of revulsion is too strong to meet the zebra mussel even halfway. In “The Cecropia Cocoon” an assumption of closeness to nature is shaken by a dramatization of my unthinking neglect. The poem leaves me in an appropriate grief that I hope will serve to remind of our urgent obligation to care for earthly life of every species. We could wish the same for all our necessarily discomfiting nature poems.