A Poem Is Its Own Animal: Poetic Encounters at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum

On summer nights when the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum is open, people bring black lights to shine on the stone walls, in search of scorpions. The animals glow under ultraviolet light. Human visitors are rarely disappointed in their quest—and yes, it’s probably better for them to see scorpions here than in a closet at home. Thinking about these encounters got me to wondering—are there poems that would glow in black light?

As the Desert Museum’s poet in residence, I had the chance to find out. I asked Alberto Álvaro Ríos if he had any scorpion poems, and he e-mailed me a couple of his one-line greguerías:

Scorpions are lobsters sent west by the witness protection program.

The scorpion carries on its back the question mark of its existence.

As soon as I saw these poems, I imagined them fluorescing, a scorpion walking through the words “carries on its,” perhaps pausing to rest in the q of “question mark of its existence.” That line works in a number of ways; it resonates with the shape of the scorpion and also with its life history. Young scorpions spend their first couple weeks of life riding on their mother’s back, until their exoskeleton comes in.

We painted the line in black-light paint on the stone wall. You couldn’t see it during the day—just at night under ultraviolet light. Placed within the resonances of the site, within the landscape of the Desert Museum, the poem would be a surprise to the humans who visited, a kind of hidden message.

On the first night after the scorpion poem was installed, I stood back and watched as people discovered it. A scorpion rested directly underneath the word scorpion. Another left its crevice, scurried through the and entered another gap between the stones. A young boy followed the words with his black light, reading them out loud as they appeared. He turned to an adult, who asked him what he thought it meant. The boy thought for a moment and then said, “Oh, I get it! I learned about that—it’s about how scorpions put their babies on their backs.”

All art is empathy,” writes Alison Hawthorne Deming in Zoologies. And she asks, “Do you remember a time when you saw an animal and it made you startle into wonder? That moment of consciousness is where art and science and religion were born, that moment of snapping awake.” I want to think about poems in the widest sense—as stored energy and energy transfer. As instigators of moments of snapping awake. The boundaries of a poem extend well past the page, well past what we even understand as language.

The events that led me to thinking about poetry as habitat for scorpions circle back to something I heard poet Sandra Alcosser say at a reading at the University of Arizona Poetry Center in 2009. Describing her work as poet-in-residence at New York City’s Central Park Zoo, in which she curated poems to be placed within the zoo, she joked at one point that she thought about turning the poems around so that the animals could benefit from them. Three years later, when I began my work at the Desert Museum, Sandra’s comment kept running through my mind. What would it look like to present poetry for all the creatures who would inhabit or visit the space, not just for the humans? Brenda Iijima writes of poetry as a process that “recalibrates the social—how we function dynamically in space, in time, with each other—communally, communicational.” Poetry also can help us to think of the social in the widest—human and nonhuman—sense. While the scorpion poem wasn’t literally turned around for the scorpion to read, it became a part of its habitat.

Woven Words, our project at the Desert Museum, is a collaboration with the University of Arizona Poetry Center and is modeled in part on The Language of Conservation, a Poets House program that, building off of...