Hmm what’s on Tuesdays agenda? Today I’m going to be on Humbolt radio with Ben Goldfarb and Tom Wheeler of EPIC discussing beavers and salmon and then I’m getting a haircut. My life is such that at the moment I’m actually more worried about the haircut, but I guess both could be a fiasco. I’ll keep you posted.

Meanwhile it’s time for another beaver first. Beaver poem in the New Yorker. by Maggie Millner. Click on the image to listen to the reading.

Etiology

I was born to watch
   the beavers’ chewing
flood the pond.
   Fated to bear witness
to such confident
   accretion, my life was bitten down

into a point
   that pointed toward
the dome, its whole shorn forest
   brought to thatch,
incredibly, by teeth.
   There is a seal

that spends each morning
   blunting its incisors
on the ice—
   rasping open breathing holes
that close if not
   routinely shaven back—

until one day its teeth,
   now dull and domed,
stop breaking through,
   the animal beating
its soft enamel
   on the ceiling

as it drowns. There can be no
    proceeding from.
There is only gnawing
   through the visible,
wearing down
   the center between living

and its damages, until
   the center’s broken door
stops granting us admission
   to our lives.
The beavers graft another
   layer on the dam.

They slap their tails
so loud a sound
like falling dice
skitters the smooth,
unfrozen surface of the pond.
Or what had been the pond

before it overflowed
   its banks and drowned
the meadow and the campsite
   and the fire pit we used
to turn our spits over,
   the tusky wooden tapers

of our spits. I was born
   in time to see it swamp,
my life a parallel, accumulative
   loss of definition.
If I am still enough, the beavers
   will reveal their door,

the jamb of which they clot
   into a lodge before my eyes,
the underwater hatch
   through which their chambered
penetralia take shape.
   My ways, my mammal acumen,

are forgeries of theirs—
   to have been underwater
all that time, salient
   to the outer world
only as a dome,
   before tearing through the doorway

of that world,
   loud and blue
and sure my life was mine.

Hmm something tells me these are symbolic (and not actual) beavers. Too bad she wasn’t born to watch beavers create ecosystems or prevent fires. Of course the New Yorker has given us many of our best beaver cartoons. Who could ever forget this my all-time favorite? If you know the science it’s not even funny.

Alright, you’ve had your culture. Now it’s time for some radio fun. I’ll post the link when I can. Oh and happy Birthday to a certain Beaver author who’s making the news a lot lately.