What Things Are Made Of

Dark Penguin

9 Dark Penguin After the oil spill, he’s front-page news: a beak-faced, heart-sick Muppet who fell into a vat of chocolate, as the Lowes Bros sang to packed houses in the fifties, before so-called folk music fell from grace. Folks had more substantial molecules back then. You could still meet an old black man cane-poling, and he’d call you Son, and knock you flat in the mud with catfish wisdom. But Dem days done gone. Feathered and tarred, our penguin looks depressed enough for shock therapy. Those scientists who say only humans feel emotion, never owned a dog, a vindictive ferret, or ambivalent lovebird. They’re no Einsteins, those scientists. Albert and Tammy Tortoise were a happy pair before a neighbor gave me a new female: younger than Tammy, more lineated shell, a chelonian hard-body, which Al banged right away. (They really banged, shell against shell. Day after day.) Tammy took to her burrow, and died. My grandma died when Mom was nine. Death didn’t hide in hospitals back then. Folk was the only music on the farm where Grandma squeezed out her eight kids—three dead before cancer killed her at thirty-five. Mom watched her fall in on herself like a cardboard box in flames. The sight hardened: a lump of fear she passed to me like an heirloom that Goodwill can never haul away, and no matter where you dump it, drags back home. Dick Lowes won’t let his son come home since Dick Jr. played Taylor Bust in a porn film and made his mother cry. Mr. July, the Eastern Box on my World Turtles calendar, has an orange-spotted shell and crimson eyes like Torpy T, 10 crushed by a truck when I was ten. I cried that day the way I want to when July ends, and a Hawksbill— endangered—takes poor Torpy’s place. Dark Penguin, if it lives, will pass on its dark fears: orcas, great whites, gooey black seas. The days of virgin ice and endless krill have gone the way of folk songs and Dragnet. I’d forgotten that show until, last night, an owl called Who-hoo-who-hoo like the theme. So long, Sergeant Friday. So long, “Just the facts, ma’am.” So long, husband of my friend Mary Ann, who stays in her burrow and cries. In water, flightless penguins fly. They range in size from emperor (4 feet, 90 pounds) to fairy (16 inches, 2 pounds). The newspapers don’t tell the species of their cover-bird. Maybe its bird-brain had no hopes to crush and grind. Maybe its sorrow’s all in the beholder’s mind. ...