Image courtesy of Loretta Collins Klobah.

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Chairman of the Committee on Nomenclature

By bel canto, coo, hoot, pip, or trill,
young Leopold could name that bird,
using string to noose wrens and warblers,
bag up his feathery collection for a display.
Little deaths, eroto-executions, sado-scientific
quest to document through snuffing out
winged things with chloroform,
stirred a quick ache in Leopold
but no remorse.  Split the throat
that sings. He discovered that to classify
study, order, name was a thrill.
Birding wasn’t his only passion
after he met Richard Loeb.
They wanted to be brilliant,
to get fame others didn’t deserve,
to be ubermen of their generation,
to have attention, to be clever,
to have coverage by the press,
to control the pulse of another’s life,
to carry it off as planned, to get off scott-free,
to nurse a secret thrill that only they shared,
a kind of endless orgasm of the imagination—
without remorse. They planned a perfect murder.
They nabbed a school boy who was walking home.
When he could not be chloroformed as easily as a bird,
they hammered his head inside the car, and then
lugged the broken Bobby Franks to Leopold’s birding field
and stuffed him into a storm drain, dropping
Leopold’s glasses from a shirt pocket.
Things didn’t go as planned. Loeb died in jail,
while Leopold was used as a malaria lab rat at Statesville Pen.
A priest bartered his release, so he flew to Puerto Rico,
a bird of passage, an assassin turned ornithologist,
who would pen the definitive book on Puerto Rican birds.
He forever kept Loeb’s photo on his bed stand,
his past classified and documented. Re-naming himself,
he re-named our endemic birds and transients,
those that return in the fall or spring,
but do not breed or live here year round.
The island’s way of doing things frustrated him.
For instance, the maze of Spanish names for the Puerto Rican tody,
which, by the way, generally kept itself from being seen
by ornithologists. When Leopold asked what we
call the bird,  la gente sang out so many names
“Medio Peso,” “San Pedrito,” “San Pedro,” “Peseta,”
“Papagayo,” “Barracolino,” “Verador,” and “Verdadón”
You see, Puerto Rican birds have the habit
of resisting attempts to name them just one thing.
Puerto Rican birds don’t answer back or come
when called by any of their names.
And so Nathan Leopold, Jr., specialized in the plain pigeon,
la paloma sabanera de Puerto Rico,
Columba inornata wetmorei,
Bird #116 on his checklist.
He found ten near Cidra in October of 1963.
In November, he collected a male specimen,
illustrated on page 119 of his bird book,
wings splayed.
Coo-coo-booyah.

 

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Campeonato

At the competition corral,
in the front bleacher at the rail,
I lose the children’s sounds, the crowd.
White-grey dappled Paso Fino,
smoke gathered in a brandy glass
on her stockings and hindquarters,
arched neck high-carriaged, no head toss,
her big, deep eyes concentrating,
utterly alert and focused
on the motions of the fino.
Long forelock parted, white lashes—
she does not care about her mane,
or lifted tail whisking the ground.
In depths of her chest, heart hammers.
Propulsion churns from quadriceps.
Legs lift en cuatro tiempos
laterales— the one raza
with this fine isochronous gait.
Front legs fully collect, high-knee,
in short-stride, precise, rapid prance,
smooth, poco translación, no bounce,
hardly moving forward at all,
deft, inching, deliberate steps,
hooves hitting the ground with a speed
of ten beats per second. Pistons;
a fast sewing machine needle.

I see the gaskins and cannons,
pectorals, shoulders, back, barrel,
croup, loins, flanks, strong rump, all contained,
straining in unison, but no signs
of heat stress, no frothing white foam
slathering shoulders and withers,
which means the horse is done, sent out
to cool off. Nostrils dilated,
una perfeccionista,
she takes all the time in the world
to move past me, a touch away,
in her proud, quick-step, stylish march.

She needs no movement of the reins
from her jínete, who seems to glide
rather than ride on a horse back.
He sits relaxed, no rigid spine,
patient and formal in posture,
in simple equestrian dress
of white shirt, black ribbon bow tie,
topped in a small-brimmed, flat, black hat,
no use of crops or steel boot spurs.

In the corner of the corral,
he pulls the reins with one finger,
to back her up, under manners,
spirited head still, ears erect,
no swishing of the tail, still high.

In front of the judges’ table,
a narrow, wooden sounding board,
is in the center of the rink,
like a fashion model’s catwalk.
The plywood plank amplifies sound,
the meter of staccato beats.

She approaches it, tracking straight
down the sounding board— los cascos
tocan, and the arena fills
with “tas” and reverberations—
an accurate rap of hoofbeats—
taps entering us like shrapnel,
ta-ca ta-ca ta-ca ta-ca.
Her long face is at attention,
her body, rousing athlete,
working, taxed, but maintaining grace,
hooves set down micro-distances
in front of their last locations.
Now, this is the Classic Fino.
For years, I will think about her,
her extreme determination.

All those random Saturday drives
en el campo, las montañas
of Aguas Buenas, Guavate,
where bareback, barefooted boys trot
their Pasos at curving road’s edge;

in fiestas of Loíza,
when a Santiago statue,
festooned, is paraded through streets—
Santiago, savior of Spain,
defeater of retreating Moors,
always on horseback, a Moor’s head,
decapitated, crushed under,
his stallion’s triumphant front hoof—
carted through Afro-boricua
pueblo, where groups of teenage boys
pedal bicycles, trick bikes,
while dreadlocked youths canter horses
past the locas, vejigantes;

white Paso Fino performing
the Levade and Pesade,
for tourists in the Ballajá,
crimped mane in blue spotlight, dancing
on its hindquarters, forelegs raised,
with a blanquita—pale woman
in a starched, lacy bomba dress;

those black chestnut Pasos
riot police rode on campus,
in black tack, uniforms and shields,
futuristic medieval knights
truncheon-armed against students;
those Paso Finos, I have known.

Paso Fino, still in my dreams,
bred of Spanish Barb and Jennet,
Andulsian, brought here
to Borinquen by Columbus
and Gov. Juan Ponce de León.
The conquistadors had the time
for volley, retreat, and trampling
people to death on plantations
and in narrow, blue-cobbled streets
of Old San Juan— five hundred years.

White-ash pony of my daydreams—
how hard you have strained and struggled.
I want to ask you if you could
give up this training, break away
from this arena and your sport?
Rear up, strike quick, at this late date,
unseat your jínete, topple
the trainers, clench bit in your teeth?
When, if not now, would you do it?

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Loretta Collins Klobah is a Full Professor of Caribbean Literature and creative writing at the University of Puerto Rico in San Juan. She has published or has poetry forthcoming in several journals, including The Caribbean Writer, Bim, Poui, Caribbean Beat Magazine, The New Yorker, TriQuaterly Review, Black Warrior Review, The Antioch Review, Quarterly West, Cimarron Review, and The Missouri Review. Her debut poetry collection, The Twelve-Foot Neon Woman  (Leeds, Peepal Tree Press, 2011), received the 2012 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature in the category of poetry (Trinidad and Tobago). It was also one of five books short-listed for the 2012 Felix Dennis Prize for the Best First Collection, offered by Forward Arts Foundation in the UK. She has received a Pushcart Prize and the Earl Lyons Award from the American Academy of Poets. She was one of eight poets to be published in the anthology New Caribbean Poetry (Carcanet Press,2007), edited by Kei Miller.