levelheaded: Catamount

“Catamount” is a response to and recasting of D.H. Lawrence’s “Mountain Lion.” In Lawrence’s poem, his speaker encounters two men carrying a recently killed mountain lion down a “vanishing trail.” Ultimately, the speaker mourns the death of the lion, saying “Yet what a gap in the world, the missing white frost-face of that slim yellow mountain lion!” Lawrence’s poem is notable for its environmentalist bent, but also for the physicality of its description:

Her round, fine-fashioned head, with two dead ears;
And stripes in the brilliant frost of her face, sharp, fine dark rays,
Dark, keen, fine rays in the brilliant frost of her face.
Beautiful dead eyes.

By comparison, “Catamount” speaks abstractly about mountain lions. Their absence in the poem stands in stark relief to the presence of even a dead mountain lion in Lawrence’s poem. The speaker comes close to presenting an actual cougar when he asks “Who here hasn’t felt / Stiletto eyes stealthy on their hiking / Family, hailed the wanton trooper’s shot?,” but his “feeling” doesn’t match up to the corporeal reality of Lawrence’s description. Perhaps surprisingly, the absence of an actual mountain lion from the poem is one of its most persuasive elements.

Some of this poem’s descriptors (“frost-face,” “yellow pelt”) for the mountain lion are knowingly borrowed from Lawrence’s poem. Similarly, its first line is constructed from the Spanish bits of Lawrence’s poem. It’s as if the speaker’s framework for thinking and talking about mountain lions stems from a mythical ideal that the Lawrence poem represents. The absence of an actual mountain lion highlights the scarcity of mountain lions in North America after many years of persecution (though there is some reason to think they’re making their way back east).  While D.H. Lawrence may have actually seen a mountain lion during his time in New Mexico, our speaker only halfheartedly alludes to having “felt” (read: imagined) a lion’s eyes.

By extension, the poem is also about the power—and limits—of poetry. The speaker knows the Lawrence poem. He tells us “We teach it to our children in our schools, / Spread wide along the Front Range” but later reminds us they are “also taught to fight back if attacked.” Poetry is presented as the weaker half of a mixed message—weaker because humans are largely responsible, directly and indirectly, for the deaths of many cougars despite the existence of Lawrence’s apparently widely distributed poem. When the speaker in “Catamount” responds directly to Lawrence by asking “Which of us would / Count our child among the million or two / To be executed?,” we can readily answer, “Not me.”

Ogbuji’s and Lawrence’s suggestion that “we might spare a million or two humans / And never miss them” only makes sense as a reminder that we probably have “spared” millions of mountain lions and never miss them. “Catamount’s” important refrain, “Gold flecks exposed as elder snows melt,” also conveys multiple meanings and thus deepens with repetition. It might refer to the “yellow pelt” of mountain lions. It might also refer to literal gold “Since we spilled into these hills to mine, to smelt.” And in light of the line, “Where mankind must now mind land and atmosphere,” it’s easy to see the melting snow as a reminder of global climate change and its effect on the environment, extending Lawrence’s environmentalism and reminding us that if we don’t act, his fantasy of “a million or two humans” might come true.

– The Editors