Caleb Parkin

JAYBOURS

Their front door slams. Shudder-thud of wingbeats.
Both heads bob up, either side of the landing window,
twitching back at me, onlooker, looker-in. Will they
ever invite us over, to compare footprints? Neighbours’
homes, museums of what might have been. Monday,
I wait to see what’s in their kerbside boxes:
brimming with acorn hats, the odd gristled tibia.
At night, no lights as they a nest in the post-
code’s secrets, dragged in through an always-open back door.
Cold, in their frenetic admin of twigs and conciliatory skreeks.
Last night, I heard them speak: Little shithead…I’ll leave it
under the doormat. Not quite right, as though spoken
by a fungus radiating pinkly from the bole in a branch;
or a sample, captured on wax cylinder, sticky like an open beak.
Then a great gnarled oak erupted through their chimney:
the whole house cleaved in two, electrical wires
prickling from mortar like feathers after a molt.
The jays nowhere to be seen – leaving only the wail
of what may have been a human infant,
somewhere in the welter of rooftiles and bark.

Portrait of Charlie as a Troller

 If you ever wonder what kind of fisherman that is, take a look at their boat.
- Charlie Wilbur

Sitka, Alaska

Charlie’s bow is grey-beard gleam
and he gestures with outriggers wide:
to the swell of each season; to ocean’s
fond corrosion; to all hungry critters

nibbling at wooden hulls. Moored,
Charlie bobs serene but chugging
out of harbour, his throttle opens
and he gossips amidst the eddies.

His radio rarely breaks, even when
he lands slap-bang fish-middle;
his freezer full of tales, only
some of them now thawing.

On his deck are gawdy lures
for the Cohoe; the paravane
sails aft and below, tail him,
make a burrow in his wake.

Charlie might travel with a fleet
as the decades demand, won’t
claim any patch of waves, even
when he reaches them first.

Charlie won’t respond to a super-
trawler’s drawl or bellicose nets,
but he’ll bait with their dregs.
Hell, nobody can own the ocean.

There’s a lot of hooks along the way
from Seattle to Sitka, and only a few
of them are his. A fish on Charlie’s
deck will be kept, not sploshed back

in the wanton glitter of bycatch.
Five-knot days with three-foot
seas, you’ll see Charlie sail past
otters’ chomping rafts with a smile

of glinting harbour porpoise.
Before a long winter, dreaming in
petitions, snoring through un-
tangleable nights, Charlie crests

the dawn, drops a lure, rods prepped
like fingers for roulette. A bull sealion
honks. Charlie honks back. The flag
atop his crow’s nest is the dorsal crest

of all questing salmon, charting dark paths
to their first and last homes. The sea’s
shadows hold its dread of that final shoal –
which Charlie would neither seek, nor catch.

Staying Safe in Bear Country
(30m, 2008)

Kluane Lake Research Station, Yukon

tinny bluegrass soundtrack / they back-scratch tree trunks / twitch-nose chomp
pixelated wild grasses / narrator says there’d be / no attack no injury no news / no bear
/ frozen mid-leap / except we meet them / more in fear than understanding / so they
become that final cave-scratch on hiker's retinas / do you know what to do / if a bear
approaches / in curiosity anger hunger / would you recognise grizzly moods / black
tempers / do you have the presence / of voice / to speak to bear / to croak out a song
/ as you traverse shared paths / to mentally rehearse / how you should address bear /
respectfully in curiosity /sternly in animosity / how to hold your hands up / a show /
that we little humans / are no threat / how huffing moaning teeth-popping are the
lexicon / of a bear testy / in their dominance / would you lie for the bear / on your
front / with your hands / limply laced at the base of your skull / your backpack left on
/ to shield the flimsy skin / that holds your organs / could you / if it came to it / fight
for your life / aim for the face / eyes / throat / dodge those sickled paws / could you
find your inner grizzly / tell the bear / with penknife / or just pen / you are here too /
in this forest / that you mean business / have an alternative view / you will not take
this lying down / how you / bear / could become just another trash-pest dealt with /
brought to ground / tongue lolling / pink gums still bright / from their baring / to this
bright forest air / where I sing now / a cheery bear song / to let you know / we are
coming bear / we are already here

Caleb Parkin, Bristol City Poet 2020 - 22, has featured in The Guardian and as guest poet on Radio 4’s Poetry Please. He’s published three pamphlets and debut collection, This Fruiting Body was longlisted for the Laurel Prize; Mingle was published Oct 2024. He’s a PhD researcher with RENEW Biodiversity at the University of Exeter, exploring human/nonhuman communication in contemporary ecopoetry and through practice.

Caleb wrote the following about his poems.

These are three poems from my ongoing PhD research, which is looking broadly at human-nonhuman communication and ‘critterly voices’ in contemporary ecopoetry. I’m addressing this creatively through three strands – Hither, Thither and Yonder. These are drawn from Tim Morton’s idea of ‘hyperobjects’ and especially a paper called ‘Poisoned Group: Art and Philosophy in the Time of Hyperobjects’ (2013). Reflecting Morton’s assertion that art in the time of climate and biodiversity crises, should reflect – in form and content – the uncanniness of attempting to grasp such phenomena which are ungraspable in their spatial and temporal scales. My PhD is part of RENEW Biodiversity at the University of Exeter and so our connections with the more-than-human and the contested, complex idea of ‘biodiversity’ have infused my thinking.

Hither has led me to connect with here-ness by cultivating an entanglement with my local Eurasian jays as ‘queerkin’, engaging with them as collaborators. This kinship has resulted in poems exploring jay lore in culture, jays in literature, an interest in the inner lives of jays. They are elusive, canny, piratical, opportunistic, mimicking birds; their outfits appeals to me, too, with their azure wing-feathers, handlebar moustaches and hombre autumnal plumage. In their mimicry – of other birds and their surroundings – they look and speak back.

This poem, ‘Jaybours’, was prompted by seeing one of our local jays stood on a FOR SALE sign, a couple of houses down. The title then suggested itself and I’m not sorry for the pun it includes (in my critical work, I have proposed a ‘methodolo-jay’ of inter-species ‘creeping after’ poems to mimic them. I think of these jaunty puns are part of a jayful practice). It’s a What if, what then poem and often, these imaginative ‘trips’ are the poems which feel most authentic in my writing. Here, the jays have moved in to the house and I imagine what their domesticity might be like, trying and not-trying to fit in. They fill their recycling boxes with acorn-hats and bones; voices emerge from the house which may or may not be theirs (‘as though spoken / by a fungus’); until the house erupts with a ‘great gnarled oak’, the sound of what might be a baby somewhere in the resulting ‘welter’. It’s not hard to see the un-homely/unheimlich/uncanny aspects to this – the strangeness of suburbia and its (heteronormative) performances, disrupted by these birds failures to fit in. And it’s not hard to see, now, that as a queer, male couple living in the ‘burbs, I am not just writing about jays.

The two other poems are from the Thither strand of work, written during and (still!) after a trip to Yukon, Alaska and California, in September 2024, as kind of a poet-in-residence on the Field Ecology unit with undergraduates from Exeter. I wanted to write a travelogue of going somewhere completely different and new; to consider the different ways of knowing a landscape, its human and nonhuman inhabitants; and what acts of communication occur between human and nonhuman animals in those contexts. The field trip – or ‘research adventure’, as I dubbed it – started at the Kluane Lake Research Station, Yukon, (on land now known as) Canada.

A short sequence of ‘Bear Talk’ poems will thread through my creative PhD output (book) and ‘Staying Safe in Bear Country’ is one of them. In Yukon (and in Sitka, Alaska) we had to have a briefing on the possibility of encountering bears. It struck me how this would have been the case in what is now the UK and in Europe: humans (some more than others) having wiped out these other large, carnivoran mammals from so much of the world’s surface. This prose poem is kinda ekphrastic: an augmented account of the informational video of the same title (it’s on YouTube!) we were shown when we arrived, as part of our induction. What fascinated me in the video was an attempt to give viewers – us – a primer on bear behaviour. Bears – grizzlies and black bears in that area – are very communicative animals, so meeting one with the right body language and tone might be the difference between a peaceful and violent encounter. We communicate with the bears, they with us. We can meet them ‘respectfully’ or ‘sternly’, depending on their demeanour (these modes struck me as particularly Canadian, somehow). I had also had a fascinating conversation with a Kluane First Nations – who self-govern the area – educator about their phenomenological stance on sharing space with bears. Ultimately, I was struck by the feebleness of some of the video’s approaches – much as I agree we should try – if a bear takes against you being in the – their? – forest. The tragedy of magnificent bears being killed when they cross the illusory threshold into human habitation, for the food humans leave out in abundance for them. And isn’t that food waste, our flimsy infrastructure of binbags, the ever-expanding space (settler-colonist) humans take up, a communication with the bears, too?

Charlie Wilbur is a fisherman in Sitka, Alaska, with whom we were lucky enough to have a tour of the fishing boat marina in the Pacific North-West town. I wanted to give a sense of Charlie’s charm, humour, bonhomie and the sense of generosity he has towards his fellow fishermen, townsfolk, and to the sea itself. Based on the epigraph quote from Charlie – who is so quotable – I took the stance of Charlie-as-boat to explore some of this. I admired Charlie’s practicality, his activism, and how he held the paradoxes of salmon fishing with such good humour and grace. (For example, troller fishing itself is much lower-yield and therefore tricky to sustain, but to keep the troller – a particular kind of long-line fishing boat – trade afloat (!), they rely on the bycatch of supertrawlers doing immeasurable harm to the ocean’s biodiversity.) Charlie palpably loves the salmon, the sea, the culture around it. He wants to take care of it and for others to do so, if at all possible. I had a deep sense of his communion with the sea and its nonhuman inhabitants, the salmon he fishes, their incredible journeys, what they provide him and his community – and the precarity of all of this.