“Hawking Rabbit Feet in the Age of Disbelief,” by Abigail Chabitnoy
I like how it takes me a while to figure out what Abigail Chabitnoy‘s Hawking Rabbit Feet in the Age of Disbelief might be about. Like it takes some time to move from its opening on birds to, about two-thirds through, its thoughts on climate change—especially the disaster that’s impending. And I appreciate the surprise nature of the shift. Because the argument on climate change isn’t all that subtle. I mean, it sneaks up on the reader. There are clues the poem might be dealing with more than just birds when the ark appears in the second section. But the birds are so evocative at the opening. And so I’m mostly reading for the connection between the birds in the church from section 1 to the birds being denied a space in the ark in section 2. And I’m wondering how the “new love” from section 1 might have advanced to the ark setting.
But that’s not how this poem is going to work. Birds are assuredly one of the vehicles. The repeated reference to birds is like a language or a grammar for the poem. And accepting the terms of this vehicle is especially important when my reading reaches section 5, where the poem shifts from birds to “white plastic bags flutter treetops.” Because the image of birds hung from a church ceiling, birds clinging to a boat’s rigging, birds on an island feeding on the cast-off from tourists, these birds anchor the poem. And the abrupt appearance of the white plastic bags easily transforms them for me into limp, plastic sculptures I might see fluttering at the top of a tree. That image merged with the kites that use plastic to build their nests, it sets the entirety of section 5 to a commentary on nature’s adaptations. Nature’s desperate reach even as climate change worsens. These pivots from one section to the next, that lead my reading to the poet’s dismal statement about the future, makes me feel like the poem is taking its time, AND the poem is uncovering its own logic. So even amidst what could be described as a series of minimalist impressions, the poem operates in an excess of sense. It can install the ocean as a secondary vehicle (as a common setting where many of these birds can be found). It can touch on the irony that makes Kentucky a suitable site for the “Ark Encounter,” where tourists eager to see a scale model of Noah’s ark can be satisfied. All these seemingly extraneous considerations ultimately tuck into an incisive statement about climate. And I like that the poem takes its time to get there.
This poem’s running reference to birds reminds me a lot of the salmon from Chabitnoy’s first book, How to Dress a Fish (Wesleyan University Press, 2019), where the image of salmon elaborates on itself, thinking to the very edges of itself. In “Hawing Rabbit Feet in the Age of Disbelief,” the birds participate with belief, or hope. Constituting the complex sentiment the salmon revisit each time they’re mentioned in Chabitnoy’s book. In the opening of this poem it feels as though they could evoke or symbolize sentiment, though I don’t think the birds are given enough space to fully elaborate on what that sentiment might mean for the poet. They have been hung from something inside the church. Or they are merely the birds’ wings dried out. The poem’s opening considers these gestures in light of the poet being newly in love. The poem seems to highlight that fatalistic worry that can overtake new love, or that can lurk at the edges of new love, like the body wondering aloud to itself, “Why this now?” Should she have seen whatever this is all along, given the birds only gave “the illusion of flight”? Are these birds like the rabbit foot you can find in souvenir shops (possibly at the “Ark Encounter,” where I think their appearance could be read for its morbid truth). Birds evoking new love, but then life shows how complicated birds can be to any landscape. So that by the end of section 5 whatever otherworldly sensation these birds should have represented splinters the poet’s grammar with en-dash and slashes. What is belief or hope in the face of climate change, fated to a life of swimming, and/or to nothing at all?
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