Ecological Grief and Nature in Rio Cortez’s Golden Ax

Defining the Thematic Claim

In Golden Ax, ecological grief is not merely a backdrop but an active force that intertwines the speaker’s personal losses with collective historical trauma. The poem sequence consistently uses disrupted animal behavior, decaying natural landscapes, and the physical geography of Utah—especially Antelope Island and the Great Salt Lake—to witness the speaker’s sorrow. The thematic claim can be stated as: ecological disruption mirrors the rupture of family history and the ongoing grief of displacement, while nature simultaneously offers a space for continuity and imaginative restoration.

Rio Cortez’s concept of Afropioneerism (as defined in the Author’s Note) roots this grief in the migration of Black families to the West after Reconstruction. The land itself becomes a character—haunted by what was taken and what was built. The speaker’s eye for dying antelope, fleeing cowbirds, and melting snow cups reveals a consciousness that cannot separate personal loss from environmental crisis.

Tracing the Theme Across the Plot

1. Disrupted Animal Behavior on Antelope Island (Chapter 7: “Like a Suggestion”)

The poem opens with an eerie observation: “The antelope start dying, / of all places, on Antelope / Island.” This is not random. The island’s very name promises the presence of antelope, yet the animals are perishing. The speaker’s greyhounds “startle in their sleep and walk / together toward the window,” as if sensing something wrong. The poem accumulates more signs of ecological breakdown: wolves hunt bison out of season, cowbirds abandon wooden fences, Atlantic salmon fail to return to freshwater. Even the household cat stops at an open door and runs when the speaker tries to touch her.

These disjointed images act as a catalogue of grief. The speaker is not directly describing her own pain; instead, the natural world performs it. The line “the cat stands still / before an open door to the house” mirrors the speaker’s own hesitation, her inability to step fully into a space of comfort. The poem title “Like a Suggestion” implies that these deaths are hints of a larger unraveling—both ecological and personal. The Great Salt Lake, visible from Antelope Island, becomes a silent witness to this unraveling, a body of water that is itself shrinking due to drought and diversion.

2. Nature as Ancestral Continuity (Chapter 9: “The Idea of Ancestry”)

In direct contrast to the fragmentation of “Like a Suggestion,” “The Idea of Ancestry” presents nature as a conduit to the past. The speaker stands “in Millcreek / on a road / in its canyon” and feels the presence of her people: her grandmother fished there, her grandfather’s grandfather felled timber there, her mother’s grandmother’s mother built a house from that timber. The aspen trees “singing in the wind” produce the same sound heard by black bears and moose calves. The speaker declares, “I know it sang / just like this / for them.”

Here, ecological grief takes a different shape: it is not the loss of nature but the fragile survival of it that allows connection. The speaker notes that the timber roof “has kept the frost / from coming in / and stinging my babies.” Nature becomes a shelter, but one built by labor and memory. The poem ends with the image of lying “in the deerwood and the aster / and never-ending.” This suggests a desire for dissolution into the landscape, a merging with the natural cycles that have held her ancestors. Yet this merging is bittersweet, because the landscape that sustains her is also the one that witnessed her ancestors’ struggles.

3. The Domestic Threshold and the Elk (Chapter 49: “Eden”)

“Eden” moves the grief indoors. The speaker stands at the kitchen window washing her daughter’s dishes while watching an elk on the mountain. She asks, “am I home or am I only visiting?” This question echoes the broader condition of the Afropioneer: living in a place where one’s family has been for generations, yet still feeling like an outsider. The natural world—the elk, the aspen, the snow cup—offers no clear answer. The wind “sweeps through the aspen like a hiss,” and the speaker describes herself as being “in our own snow cup / melted to the summer people we really are.” Snow cup is a term for a cup-shaped depression in snow that forms around a tree trunk due to heat absorption; it melts from the inside out. The metaphor suggests that the speaker is gradually revealing her true self as the protective winter of displacement thaws.

Ecological grief here is quiet but pervasive. The elk is indifferent; the mountain is an allegory the speaker half-embraces. The poem ends with her “really leaving now / moving through the told story.” This is a departure not from a physical place but from a fixed identity. The ecological world—the hissing aspen, the melting snow—becomes the medium through which she transforms her grief into agency.

Character and Symbol Connections

The speaker—Rio Cortez’s poet’s persona—is the primary vehicle for ecological grief. She is both a descendant of Paul C. Howell (the first Black police detective in Utah) and Byrdie Lee Howell Langon (author of Utah and the Early Black Settlers). Their histories are rooted in the land, and the speaker’s grief is inherited from their struggles.

Symbols from the book reinforce the ecological dimension:

• Salt is tied to the Great Salt Lake, a terminal lake that is slowly disappearing. Salt preserves but also burns; it is a witness to the past. The lake’s salinity prevents most fish from living, making it a place of unusual life and death.
• Covered wagon as spaceship connects the pioneer journey to cosmic imagination. The wagon carried ancestors across a harsh, often unfriendly landscape; the spaceship motif reframes that movement as survival and possibility, even as the ecological toll of settlement remains.
• Scorpion appears in desert imagery, representing danger and resilience. It is a creature that thrives in harsh conditions, much like the Afropioneer families who made Utah home.

These symbols do not resolve the ecological grief; they deepen its complexity. Salt can be a preservative or a corrosive; the covered wagon/spaceship implies both escape and exhaustion; the scorpion is both feared and admired.

Complexity and Contradiction

The speaker’s ecological grief is not monolithic. It coexists with moments of joy and communion. In “The Idea of Ancestry,” she declares, “I consider choosing / there are times / when it is a joy / to remember.” Grief and joy are interwoven. In “Family Tree at Earth’s Surface” (Chapter 48), the speaker abandons the impulse to count and name ancestors after realizing that emotional connection to the unnamed past is more valuable than genealogical record. This is a kind of acceptance of loss—ecological grief as a letting go.

Moreover, the book acknowledges the land’s troubled history. The Author’s Note states, “The land where Utah exists haunts our story.” The land was stolen from Indigenous peoples, and the speaker’s family arrived as part of a settler migration. Ecological grief becomes entangled with the ethics of dwelling. The speaker does not pretend to own the land; she asks, “am I home or am I only visiting?” This question remains unresolved, and that is the point. Grief, especially ecological grief, cannot be resolved through poetry alone. It must be lived with.

Study Questions and Answers

1. How does the poem “Like a Suggestion” use animal behavior to express the speaker’s internal state?
   The poem lists several instances of unnatural animal behavior—antelope dying on Antelope Island, wolves hunting bison in spring, cowbirds abandoning fences, salmon not returning—to create a parallel with the speaker’s own disorientation. The cat that runs when the speaker reaches for it mirrors her sense of being unable to connect or find comfort. The natural world becomes a projection of grief, suggesting that personal loss is inseparable from environmental collapse.

2. In “The Idea of Ancestry,” what role does the aspen tree play in linking the speaker to her ancestors?
   The aspen’s leaves are described as “green coins / singing in the wind.” The speaker imagines that the same sound “sang / just like this / for them.” The aspen becomes a living archive of sound that persists across generations. It connects her to the land her ancestors worked and inhabited, offering a tangible link to a past that genealogical records cannot fully capture.

3. How does the kitchen window in “Eden” serve as a threshold between domestic and ecological grief?
   The speaker stands inside, washing dishes while watching an elk outside. The window separates two spaces: the domestic (where she cares for her daughter) and the ecological (the mountain, the elk, the aspen). This threshold allows her to hold both realms together. Her question, “am I home or am I only visiting?,” is posed from this border, indicating that her grief about belonging is mediated by the natural world she observes.

4. What does the metaphor of the “snow cup” in “Eden” reveal about the speaker’s sense of self?
   A snow cup forms around a tree trunk as the snow melts from the inside. The speaker says, “we are in our own snow cup / melted to the summer people we really are.” This suggests that the speaker’s protective layer (the snow of displacement or grief) is thawing to reveal a truer identity. The melting is a slow process of transformation, implying that ecological cycles (seasonal change) mirror her personal evolution.

5. In what ways does Golden Ax complicate the idea of nature as a source of healing?
   While nature does offer moments of communion (the aspen song, the elk sighting), it also displays death and disruption (antelope dying, salmon not returning). The speaker never fully achieves a sense of belonging; she remains a visitor. Furthermore, the land is haunted by the history of settler colonialism and racial injustice, so nature cannot be an innocent escape. The book suggests that ecological grief must be held alongside historical grief, and that healing is partial and ongoing, not a final state.