I take my victories where I can find them. Two days ago I won a staring contest with a coyote. The bunny, paralyzed with fear between us, lived, too. I stood still for what seemed half an eternity, he approached a step or two but then reconsidered. Time enough to take the photographs, and for a Painted Lady to land on the scat he left behind. No matter how often I feel blessed by nature, some encounters are unexpected, as if by magic, and make my heart race. With joy more than fear.

It had already been a morning filled with sweet encounters. The hungry scrub jay fledglings waiting for their mother,

other mothers readjusting worms in beaks.

Egrets hanging out, with a cacophony of their screaming offspring in nests in the woods behind them.

Glimpses of snowcapped Mt. St. Helens in the distance.

I had come to photograph something altogether different, though. I wanted to capture the star-like flowers of hemlock or cow parsley, you choose. (I have written about the distinction between these two, the former highly toxic, the latter good for making soup, previously here.) I needed a stand-in for stars, since they play such an important role in the poem attached below, not having images for the real thing since I rarely see them these days. Either it is too cloudy, or I am in bed already.

I don’t know why I had not come across this poem earlier – it has been around for a long time. Since 1977, to be precise, in a volume called The Hocus-Pocus of the Universe. The author, Laura Gilpin, had received the Walt Whitman Poetry award the previous year. She died, not yet age 56, barely 6 months after a diagnosis of cancer, in 2007.

The Two-Headed Calf

Tomorrow when the farm boys find this
freak of nature, they will wrap his body
in newspaper and carry him to the museum.

But tonight he is alive and in the north
field with his mother. It is a perfect
summer evening: the moon rising over
the orchard, the wind in the grass. And
as he stares into the sky, there are
twice as many stars as usual.

by Laura Gilpin (1950- 2007)

The poem hit me at gut level, about the precariousness of life, about “othering,” and the hope one can find when staying in the moment, if only for a moment. It also fascinated me with a level of writing skill that manages to suggest so many different scenarios in so few lines.

What do we have here? Immediately we get introduced to the derogatory term freak. Wrapped in newspaper (a calf with two heads? Large newspaper…) reminiscent of ways to discard refuse like stinking fish. It will be displayed, gawked at, the museum replacing freak shows of yore on the circus circuit.

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, freak show is

“...a term used to describe the exhibition of exotic or deformed animals as well as humans considered to be in some way abnormal or outside broadly accepted norms. Although the collection and display of such so-called freaks have a long history, the term freak show refers to an arguably distinct American phenomenon that can be dated to the 19th century.”

Promoted by P.T.Barnum, people raved about the entertainment delivered by watching disfigured animals or humans with disabilities, weight and height differences, dwarfism included, absence or increased presence of limbs, vitiligo, and persons with ambiguous sexual characteristics including hermaphroditism. Given how indefensible and indecent amusement at the sight of human abnormalities is, it is no surprise that the world saw a “Revolt of the Freaks” in 1898, when a collection of the 40 or so most-famous performers in the world staged a labour strike while on tour in London, demanding that the management of the Barnum and Bailey circus remove the term freak from promotional materials for their shows. To no avail. It took until the middle of the 20th century for these shows to be abandoned.

What is unfortunately alive and well, though, is a (religious and ideological) movement that defines “non-normative” people as freaks, abnormalities to be eradicated from a healthy societal body, and threatens to, at best, exclude them and force them into hiding, or punish them and those who support them, or, at worst call for their extermination. From a church pulpit, no less.

In this year alone, more than 240 bills have been introduced directed against LGTBQ people, most of them trans, and the year isn’t half over. The Human Rights Campaign reports that last year, 50 transgender and gender non-conforming people have been killed in the U.S., 14 so far this year. That is not counting the suicides of mobbed or despairing trans teenagers. According to NPR, a third of the known trans-youth, 58.000 people, are in danger of losing gender affirming health care. Actually, newest statistics show that the U.S. has about 1.6 million people who are transgender, 43% young adults or teenagers.

Gilpin draws a scenario in the second stanza that shows the domesticated framework of a summer evening at the farm. North field, like a neighbor’s address, with mother, a loving family then, mellow conditions lit by the moon, soothing noises by soft wind, the mention of an orchard promising the sweetness of fruit. All is right here, as long as the cruel world can be kept at bay, and the fate of non-conforming to norms, or of disability, postponed for just a few hours longer. It is inevitable, but in the meantime there is beauty to behold. And here is a glint of magic: four eyes in two heads see double the beauty, a privilege not granted to the rest of us.

Yet the added shimmer is no compensation, in my mind, for the lack of a glimmer of hope that people will attempt to integrate physical or mental disability without prejudice, or accept gender non-conformity (not a disability!) as a human right. Or stop using it as a wedge issue in a war between polarized ideological factions.

Gilpin worked for decades on a second volume of poetry, finished shortly before her death and published posthumously, The Weight of a Soul. Mine was left less heavy by the thought that poetry can still help us think things through, sort out who is discriminating and who needs protection. My soul was also made lighter by the hocus-pocus of nature, creating every variability imaginable, shimmering in the light.

Here is some beautiful music from Australia Superclusters. More stars, for your ears this time.

Hemlock towering over me by a foot at least…