A reading of one poem from Serviceable Clothes for Life in the Open by Laura Woltag

Serviceable Clothes for Life in the Open
Laura Woltag
SpeCt! Books 2022

“Who Is In This Pooling Bridge?” a poem in Laura Woltag’s Serviceable Clothes for Life in the Open, is an example of reading the world in order to help readers collaborate with the more-than-human community. Woltag forms us into the community that we already are by virtue of “also facing extinction,” leaning on the importance of that “also.”  

The poem begins with a pocket natural history of the elephant seal.

Elephant seals originated as ocean beings, then came on land
and evolved to have fur, and then went back into the ocean.
Now they go back and forth, beaching, molting, and nursing on
Northern California beaches, then following the cool, nutrient-
rich currents up the continental shelf to Alaska.

One of the virtues of poetry is that it allows for extreme compressions of time. What is the scale of time during which elephant seals went from ocean to land to ocean to their current hybrid existence? Reading this, I felt a rapid succession of years and generations, and, in the process, my own sense of temporality, shaped by capitalism and the smart phone, suspends.

With first line of the next stanza, “One would bump each one of them, so as to say: come—go,” Woltag brings us back into the present moment, but it’s a hypothetical present. I imagine booping each elephant seal on the nose like a cat. There’s something else back of the whimsical image of a moment of interspecies intimacy. What is it? Would “one” be issuing a warning? Flee, protect yourselves.

One would bump each one of them, so as to say: come—go.
Some observers were scared by the transparency of survival.
If they who are not of an age or a species that affords mirrors,
knew. Knew to go. And how through the cells. The enclosed or
marshaled thing of sentience.

The temporality of survival has an instinctive quality. A trigger in the cells that says go. When the temperature changes? When the daylight is a certain length? How does this bone-deep knowing relate to what we think of as sentience, which Woltag describes as “enclosed or marshaled”?

Next the poem moves from cyclical to historical time: the disruption of cycles by an extractive European colonial greed.

The elephant seals were nearly hunted to extinction by colonists
for their blubber in the 19th century.

Being remote to survive when their bodies were oil. 205 gallons.
201 gallons. 210 gallons.

Where is it possible to go from the stark fact of the reduction of beings to fuel, to commodity?

Becoming what? Light? Edible? Smoke in the aging sky?

In this line of questioning, Woltag pivots to a thought I find quite beautiful:

I think about their fat like love.

before pivoting to back to a space of interspecies collaboration. This is a fertile terrain of thought and storytelling, which manifests as a continuity among some cultures, and as an emergent or (re)emergent strategy in others.  I think of writers like Yuri Rytkheu, who writes from his Chukchi culture about the kinship of humanity and whales, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s A Treatise on Stars, CAConrad’s Amanda Paradise: Resurrect Extinct Vibration, and the life practice of my friend Vidhi Gupta, who I think of as an interspecies collaborator par excellence.

When we attempt to collaborate with animals in the open
space of composition, we enter the possibility of translating
instinct. Of having our own instinct mirrored back to us things
we’ve forgotten. To participate in the intelligence shared by
transgression through mediums.

What does it mean to “collaborate with animals in the open / space of composition”? That is, don’t we have a more urgent order of business with animals? Oughtn’t we to attempt to collaborate with animals to mitigate the current ecological crisis? I appreciate that Woltag situates this collaboration within the domain of composition, because our obsession with telos, with ultimate ends, products, outcomes, is integral to the crisis. For example: a desire for light and heat to the point of authorizing mass slaughter.

So instead we compose together, a poem or a song for survival. Animals helps us engage in unforgetting. Collaboration helps us translate between different modes of intelligence, to transgress limiting and isolating mediums.

Being a body’s hoist.

In an effort to mobilize, plunge.

“…mobilize, plunge”: this shift of from the verb of armies, marching, to elephant seals, dropping into the water to make their seasonal migration.

What would await then: sun or the opposite thinking?

Catch myself: a poem is not an essay, not an argument. It can be a laying in the sun (I learn from the internet that this is called a “thermoregulatory or comfort behavior”), flopping into the water, noticing this, imagining into it, writing it down.

I’m trying to say something about the value of attending to
appearance and disappearance, while also giving spaciousness
or our experience of attachment to the beings who mirror to us
instinct, and who are also facing extinction.

Who will return? Whose disappearances in form are final? Who
will have adjusted to which drastic change?

“Who will return?” is in conversation with CAConrad’s somatic exercise of resurrecting extinct vibrations, and “Who / will have adjusted to which drastic change?” takes me to Charlie Jane Anders’ The City of the Night, a novel in the tradition of Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood trilogy, which pushes on the xenophobia that underlies human separateness, and which explores the embodied and cultural hybridity we might have to embrace to continue to survive.

I love “Who Is In This Pooling Bridge?” as an act of attention, which combines observation and care. Everything that can be written or depicted in some sense exists, so the realm of appearances encompasses everything from the physical bodies to flights of fancy. Poetry don’t have the same strictures of science, so it becomes a place to investigate, for example, interspecies communication as such, but also to invent and imagine new ways of being in relation.

Against the element devoid of physics, everything up here
cooked as everything down there cooked.

Who is in this pooling bridge?

All life salts.

To salt: to season, to preserve, to add something to secretly, to scatter. As a concluding verb, with “All life” as its subject, it is totally simple and impossibly multifarious. Like life, like the ocean, like poetry.