Observations and Insights
on the Nature of Things
This monthly column features brief essays, poems, poetic micro essays and photography
by Eve West Bessier, Poet Laureate Emerita of Silver City and Grant County, New Mexico.
Look for a new post every first Friday.
A Marginal Providence
In tribute to Ellen Meloy
The desert bighorn sheep of New Mexico
spiral downward toward potential extinction.
The robust songs of their clashing horns
cascading in echoes along canyons
grow ever closer to silent.
Their hoofed herbivore scrambles
shoot up seeming vertical escarpments,
cranny to cranny with nonchalant grace.
These mysterious creatures
disappear
in the decent of an eyelid,
leaving you to wonder
if what you saw was real
or merely apparition.
Their ice age genetic strength
survives harsh environments,
thorny foods, precipitous
escape routes,
a marginal providence.
These endangered mammals hang
on the precipice.
The desert bighorn eat stone.
We humans are the primary cause
of their demise, our lust for expansion
and resources bleeding our territories
deeper into desert wildness.
Mountain lions now easily
feast on bighorns,
their killing tactics enhanced
by our pushing the sheep
into tighter ranges, curtailing
their expedient flight.
But we who escalate the threat
can chose to restore safer havens.
In the Sacramento Mountains,
a crucial and historic
desert bighorn habitat,
conservationists are striving to shift
these iconic western creatures
with their nautilus-shaped horns
from bare-bones survival
toward renewed vitality.
Photo: Stock Source
