It's Not What You Think...

Unfortunately.

The Blue Booby

James Tate

The blue booby lives
on the bare rocks
of Galapagos
and fears nothing.
It is a simple life:
they live on fish,
and there are few predators.
Also, the males do not
make fools of themselves
chasing after the young
ladies. Rather,
they gather the blue
objects of the world
and construct from them


a nest—an occasional
Gaulois package,
a string of beads,
a piece of cloth from
a sailor’s suit. This
replaces the need for
dazzling plumage;
in fact, in the past
fifty million years
the male has grown
considerably duller,
nor can he sing well.
The female, though,


asks little of him—
the blue satisfies her
completely, has
a magical effect
on her. When she returns
from her day of
gossip and shopping,
she sees he has found her
a new shred of blue foil:
for this she rewards him
with her dark body,
the stars turn slowly
in the blue foil beside them
like the eyes of a mild savior.




Poetry is really not well-suited to learning about animals. You wouldn't guess it from the number of appearances animals make in poetry - contemporary poetry, especially. You can't walk two feet without tripping over skunks, trout, foxes, turtles. (Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, W.S. Merwin and Kay Ryan respectively.) And those are just the good ones: honestly, the menagerie has got to stop. 


I'll read Dr. Dolittle if I want to talk with the animals.


You're not going to get better than Dillard's nonfiction book "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" if you want the real story on how animals live today. Prose is far more suited to teach you about how animals behave, live, reproduce, interact. You have the space and the luxury of entering their environment, painting a vivid picture of their world and needs and habits. Poems just want to suck out the tasty cream filling in the middle for, like, metaphors and stuff.


Poetry is selfish and opportunistic this way. We'll take any field of study/subject/hobby/factoid and use a superficial detail or two to talk about what is actually interesting to us. We couldn't care less about zoology or astronomy (Auden's "The More Loving One) or necromancy (Donne's "Go and Catch a Falling Star") or laundry (Tillie Olsen's prose poem "As I Stand Here Ironing"). We want the good stuff, the juicy detail or apropos comparison or unique vocabulary that we can use for whatever BIG SUBJECT we think we're talking about today.


It reminds me a lot of Melville and how "Moby-Dick" (as I keep telling people who regret they ever asked) is NOT a rousing sea yarn. It's an extended philosophical meditation on epistemology and the unknowable nature of the universe. He uses myth and architecture, anthropology and autopsies, poetry and scripture to tell you almost everything anyone has ever known, thought, read, heard or guessed about whales. And at the end of it, what is the white whale? We're never sure. But we learned a lot about how we think we know things.


So to me, nature poems are at their best when they tell us something about people. It doesn't have to be personal, I'm not looking for a confessional lyric about your difficult upbringing in the Depression disguised as an Audobon nature documentary. But I'd like you to use the raw stuff of the world to tell me something that's not about the plumage on a blue booby. Which I thank Mr. Tate for obliging me in.


I had an undergrad professor who makes the bold claim that every poem must have a bird in it. I still don't know what he means by that. I just like that "The Blue Booby" manages to still be poetry despite being about birds.








Booby!