Confessions of a Pseudo-Nature Writer

I am standing at the corner of 30th and Madison Avenue in New York City in October 2006. I hold a cup of hot coffee to my nose and inhale deeply, a yawn escaping before I can press a polite hand over my gaping mouth. I left my wintery home in Fairbanks, Alaska, only yesterday, a seventeen hour journey from which I have not recovered, though I am pleased to be a guest reader at the 10th Anniversary Celebration for the Cave Canem Foundation. I have been thinking about the poems I will read tonight, when my attention is drawn toward a drainage grill at the curb, a graceful piece of orange and black trash floating up and forward easily. Someone next to me says, “Oh, a butterfly,” and then I see the detailed lining of black which masks each wing in an eye: a monarch. It is hard for me to believe in the middle of rushing traffic this butterfly finds something of interest worth lingering for, the fraud of some woman’s flowery perfume, perhaps?

I start across 30th and the monarch, too, is headed for the west side of the street; he rises and falls between legs, purses, and shopping bags; other people gaze with admiration at the novelty of this creature in an otherwise human-congested intersection. Coffee sloshes out of the plastic lid and I suck at the foam and milky brown richness. Luck permeates my being; the butterfly must be a sign of good things to come. He makes his way to the window of a Starbuck’s café and hovers for a moment, before turning away. In the updraft of a man tucking earphones into a pocket, he is almost struck by a skateboard under a teenager’s arm. I follow him for half a block and decide I don’t want to see him done in by a shoe or flung haphazardly against a taxi’s windshield. Hoping he will find his way to Central Park or some haven of trees and less human chaos, I head back towards my room at the Gershwin Hotel on East 27th to call home and check on my house and pets.

I have made my mind up to read all new poems at the celebration tonight. I hope my friends and colleagues will not be disappointed with another series of poems primarily focused in nature, specifically a series of poems about watching my father butcher rabbits as a child. I hope no one will be disappointed that yet again my poems do not deal explicitly with race and ethnicity. I suddenly feel like a cheat among so many poets making important new advances in the African American literature. These are the poets and writers defining black experience for a new generation of readers and critics. I am still conflicted and angry about my mixed heritage; the constant questions I ask myself about which part of me belongs to which history and race.

I will at least read a poem about watching a swarm of bees attack two white men in the woods when I was sixteen. This is an important poem I finished over the summer at the Cave Canem retreat while sitting under a gazebo and watching two cardinals tussle in a tree. I have wanted to write about growing up in rural northern California as a black person of mixed heritage. Maybe this poem says enough about how I feel about my race: my father African American Ojibwa and Jewish, and my mother Irish German. I was lonely in the confusion of my skin color. I felt the world was dangerous, and the woods were no place for a girl like me, though I went into the woods each chance I got and found some magic worth the risk. Yes, I will read this poem to show that I do know how to talk about my experience from the context of racial identity.

I am not really a nature writer, merely a child of rural landscapes, farm animals, and an endless parade of pets. The human infiltrates my poems of...