Report #07 - 16 March 2009

This week’s poem is “Farm Work (Ectopistes Migratorius)” taken from The Moon Cracks Open: A Field Guide to the Birds. It’s by far the most researched poem I’ve ever written. In reading up on the Passenger Pigeon, the story I found utterly compelling was that of Press Clay Southworth, the young farmboy who would go down in history as the person to shoot the last pigeon ever to be seen in the wild. Press lived until 1979, to the age of 94. It strikes me – the thought of living all those years, through all the changes and struggles and adventures of a life; with the fact of that single shot and that single bird always looming at the starting point.

Incidentally, the last passenger pigeon that ever lived (in captivity) was Martha, named after President Washington’s wife. She died about 1:00 pm on September 1, 1914 at the Cincinnati Zoo. This is a rare case in which we know, almost to the minute, when an extinction of a species occurred. I think one of the great tragedies of humanity is that the list of plants and animals that will never be seen again, directly due to our short-sightedness, greed and apathy, is ever-growing. And we seem to have learned nothing from the mistakes of the past.



The music for this episode is “She Drove Me Mad” from the 1998 Lounge Lizards release Queen of All Ears. I caught their show during the tour for this album. It was my third best concert ever (after Tom Waits and Ravi Shankar). The band leader, John Lurie, is also a great actor (check out Down by Law) and the creator of the brilliant parody show Fishing with John. However, he’s still on my shit-list for kicking my friend Todd off the bus even though Todd gave a perfectly valid response while playing the Name Game. … Todd, you are ON the bus.

Listen to the full episode here:
reportfromthemountains07.mp3