WIZ 1500 Review: Paradox Lost (on us)?

Book: How to Be Animal: A New History of What It Means to Be Human
Author: Melanie Challenger
Penguin Books
New York, 2021

Reviewer: Patricia K.

Sporadically across history, more consistently for the last century, conscientious people have worked at dismantling human supremacy narratives other folks have shored up for millennia. At the hearts of such stories: belief that by virtue of dominance of other species, we human beings are the highest expression of intelligent life. Our superior qualities make us unlike anything else living. This supremacy entitles us to using whatever species we wish (including our own) to our benefit, in whatever way seems good.

You don’t need X-ray glasses to see through to this credo’s backbone: valuation of life—one’s own and others’—rooted in an ethic of hierarchy.  

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The Wild Geese (latest draft)

The Wild Geese
to my husband

by Patricia G. Karamesines

An unproblematic state is a state without creative thought. Its other name is death.
–David Deutsch

I.
Rough work, hanging out
laundry in desert wind.
I got caught up in it. 
Simple chore versus
crazed local element,
favored to win.
I moved clothespins
in strategic haste,
clamping in place
fresh-washed fabric
dripping spring chill.
Gusts slapped cloth
at my face, wrapped
it ’round my arms.
I wanted it done. And so,
I nearly missed them.

Before seeing, I heard.
A voice of the air. One voice,
two birds. Geese, a pair,
seeking mown fields to settle
down for the cold March night.
One had just said something
(that I’d heard) to the other.
The other replied in wing beats
of side-by-side flight.
 
Around them, evening
fanned plumes of its own.
Clouds and molted
shadows glowed shades
of lilac, the horizon’s notched
vanes, pink tones found 
deep in layered petals
of a summer tea rose.
The familiar had turned
exotic bird of passage.
The whole beauty stopped
me, arms uplifted—
to hang my clothes.

Two birds, one flight,
their winging, a single act 
done between them.
In seconds, they crossed
acres of purple dusk.
But the moment filled
to brim, quivered there.
I admit, I thought of us.

The Wild Geese

to my husband

An unproblematic state is a state without creative thought. Its other name is death.
—David Deutsch

I.
Rough work, hanging out
laundry in desert wind.
I got caught up in it.
Simple chore versus
crazed local element,
favored to win.
I moved clothespins
in strategic haste,
clamping in place
fresh-washed fabric
dripping spring chill.
Gusts slapped cloth
at my face, wrapped
it ’round my arms.
I wanted it done. And so,
I nearly missed them.

Before seeing, I heard.
A voice of the air. One voice,
two birds. Geese, a pair,
seeking mown fields to settle
down for the cold March night.
One had just said something
(that I’d heard) to the other.
The other replied in wing beats
of side-by-side flight.