304 PART THREE
rare thing. He ’d happened on Fred Bodsworth’s The Last of the Curlews (1955),
which re-creates an Eskimo curlew’s fall and spring nine-thousand-mile migra-
tions and mating search. Well into the nineteenth century, these shorebirds with
incredible endurance flew between arctic tundra and Patagonia in mile-long
V-formations. But clubs and guns wasted them away. A Hudson’s Bay Com-
pany store in Labrador would kill two thousand a day, sometimes twenty-five
at a shotgun blast. In March 1945 a pair was spotted in Texas, then another pair
twenty years later. Since then, virtually none. So Merwin fostered a new edition,
warning against our “unending growth” and “the greed and indifference of a
species that considers its own withering arrival an improvement.” (plate 17)
Breaking from his native land, Merwin in 1963 took a long-empty stone farm-
house in southwest France. He found there an ecology of landscape, Lascaux
caves, village, workers, animals. Affection and attention run through unpunctu-
ated poem after poem chronicling blackberry brambles, oak and walnut, wild-
flowers, wine, plums and potatoes, fox, cicada, a snake ’s “empty skin like smoke
on the stone,” fishermen’s “low voices,” “the red-haired boy whose father / had
broken a leg parachuting into Provence / to join the Resistance” and been killed
by the Germans.
While keeping his Dordogne terrain, Merwin began refurbishing a house
in Chiapas, Mexico, and translated Indian poems from that region. Then in
1975, encountering another world (and a woman) in Hawaii, he moved to Maui
island where he still lives, tending an abandoned pineapple plantation on the
slopes of Haleakala volcano, reintroducing native palms and restoring original
rainforest.
This venture prompted a biting satire, “Questions to Tourists Stopped by a Pine-
apple Field,” a 102-line quasi-questionnaire with a relentless, unnerving grip.
Did you like your piece of pineapple would you like a napkin
who gave you the pineapple what do you know about themThe “broken back” line, as he calls it, helps quash the heedlessness left over
from colonialism.
did you ever imagine pineapples growing somewhere...
do you know whether pineapple is native to the islands
do you know whether the natives ate pineapple
do you know whether the natives grew pineapple
do you know how the land was acquired to be turned into pineapple
fields
do you know what is done to the land to turn it into pineapple fields...
what do you think was here before the pineapple fieldsDo you know, he ’s asking, do you think at all?