POETRY

Through the Burning World You Blazed

By Holly Haworth     Reprinted with permission from University of Georgia Press
Vertical Divider
                        Found, new madtom species, 2005. Herein described.

What’s that
mad little shadow
beneath the riffles
that curl in like pockets?
 
Lurks in rock-slab crevice,
sinks into its scaleless gossamer skin,
seeks not the spotlit surface of silv’ry seens.
Its eyes’ coinage the smooth distillate
 
of light that pools at the bottom,
it puffs not up its swim bladder—​
but let us not call it bottom-dweller. Not “it.” You, fish:
magician. I’ll call you Noturus crypticus.
 
                             Distribution: Greene County, Tennessee. Two-mile stretch of Little
                                                   Chucky Creek, from the mouth of Jackson Branch
                                                                         to the Bible Bridge road crossing.
What trick, this evolutionary
blip of creation. You've written your existence scriptless
among the benthic all these years,
carved out a life endemic,
your kind in one lone creek-corner
of the world's wide waters.
                                                              Unknown diet, spawning times, predators.
What rituals
do you enter there,
among the Bigeye Chub, Central Stoneroller,
Stripetail Darter, Striped Shiner, and Banded
Sculpin? What other shadow do you fear,
what roils your cold blood an octave? Your
barbels skimming gravel, among the soft nymphs
of mayflies or armored ones of stone-
flies, among the encased wriggling larvae of caddis,
what do you delight upon?
And what precise tilt of the earth’s axis
urges your secret heart to fire and spawn?
 
                              Can be assumed species nests under stones like all other madtom
                                    species, males guarding eggs and larvae three to four weeks.
 
Once spawned—the female having spewed her eggs,
male sputtered his seed into each globe (we must guess,
based on genus, else what shall we tell of you?)—​
 
Mr. Madtom, you build a temple,
seal yourself with the eggs,
close openings off. Circling inside
that crypt of stones, pectoral fins
sweeping out like a robe, you supplicate yourself
to the slow surge of life.
Bend to listen into the translucent orbs.
Tending to each as a prayer, you starve yourself
and wait while the missus dances her eggless skeleton
into ecstasy in the currents;
you rest, a cessation—​
feel those specters of future larvae
squirm to come to form.
 
There hidden you dwell: in completion
or what subtle action of multiplication.
 
                       Distinguished from other madtoms (genus Noturus) by anal fin, and by
                                                                                                   pigmentation.
                                                                   mtDNA showed lineage independence
 
These stones were alchemists
three and a half million years ago
or who knows when
your copper splotches
became fused with birch-leaf pigment
at the pectoral and dorsal or when
your anal fin radiated outward
two more rays (eighteen of them)
to become three-quarters of a wheel
almost spinning from the spine of your tail
and when if given the veering chance
you might have become the sun itself.
 
                           Only fourteen specimens collected; none recently found. Last known
                            specimen perished in hatchery aquarium awaiting a mate; intended
                                                                                    breeding program failed.
 
You double-helixed stroke of luck,
I am losing the use for your name
soon after I’ve named you,
you cryptic flicker of language.
My tongue plies the silence of eons
like your dorsal did the bedrock waters.
 
And when did the tense of you shift?
(Or has it yet?— foolish hope I hold onto.)
 
Presently, crypticus, you are a screen of smoke
at the bottom of the creek
behind which lies a vault of silt
that is inside a basket     of nothing but stones and crawfish
or nothing, only rubble.
 
I turn a rock slab over. Like a gray sky
it tilts; underneath, there is no trace
of a comet.

CHUCKY MADTOM

Noturus crypticus

Habitat and Range: May once have occurred more widely but is now known only from about one and a half miles of Little Chucky Creek in Greene County, Tennessee, where it was discovered in 2005.

Description and Notes: The chucky madtom gets the first part of its name from the Nolichucky River watershed (not any Charles). The “mad” part comes from a unique weapon it wields: a poison gland at the base of the pectoral spines which delivers a feeling like a bee sting. The madtoms are a group of miniature catfish (genus Noturus), which could easily be taken for the young of the more familiar large catfish. The largest Noturus, the stonecat (Noturus flavus), may grow to a foot long, but most of the approximately twenty-five species are truly diminutive (under four inches long). If you have a tiny catfish in hand and want to know if it is a madtom—without getting stung—you can look at the adipose fin on the back between the dorsal fin and the tail. (The adipose fin is really a tab of fatty tissue without the rays of spines expected from a fin.) If it connects to the tail, you have a madtom. If it's freestanding, your fish is a catfish that is still growing up. Chances of finding a chucky madtom should increase in the future because Conservation Fisheries, Inc., in Knoxville, Tennessee, with the support of many conservationists, is breeding more of the species for eventual reintroduction into streams from which they have been eradicated by pollution and deforestation.


A Literary Field Guide to
​Southern Appalachia

University of Georgia Press