Dave Bonta's "Loggerhead" starts like a dictionary entry and ends like a confession. Under its Latin subtitle, *Caretta caretta*, the opening stanza lists the word's old meanings: an insult for a person, a cannon shot, a post on a whaleboat, an iron tool for heating tar. Then it slips into the animal as if the turtle were one more definition. For most of its length the poem keeps this cool, informative voice. We hear about jaws that crunch through queen conch, a shell that leaves sharks biting at nothing, and mating that goes on for hours amid battering and bites. The final stanza then quietly turns everything over.
The form suits the voice. The poem is free verse with no rhyme and no steady metre. Nearly every stanza has three long lines and a short fourth, and the sentences ignore the breaks and keep running. The short lines ("used to heat tar", "the flat side", "into its shell,") work like small stumbles, because each leaves the reader hanging before the next stanza picks the thought up again. Sometimes the break cuts a word, as in "Its heart- / shaped carapace". The ampersands and flat, reportorial syntax make the poem sound like a field guide that has started to feel something.
Its word choices are worth watching. The first stanza is full of tools of violence: cannon, harpoon, whaleboat. The turtle's own life is then described in the same language: "armor," "combat," "spar," "rival," "attack," "gauntlet." The human and animal worlds share a vocabulary of fighting, which makes the wry stanza about "at loggerheads" more pointed. Lexicographers "insist" the turtles' mating battles are not the origin of the phrase, "though they propose no other." The poem is amused by the idea that our word for quarrelling might come from them.
The poem also leans on negatives, and they build toward the ending. Shark teeth "snap on nothing." Hatchlings are led astray by lights "that are not / the moon or stars," and the line break leaves the word *not* hanging. Many of the dangers are mentioned in passing, among raccoons, gulls and storms: "fishing nets & oil spills," and those misleading lights. The poem never says these are human-made, and it doesn't need to.
Between the dangers come moments of wonder. The "lost years," a biologists' phrase that sounds oddly mournful for a scientific term, send young turtles circling the ocean "navigating / by magnetic fields." The shell becomes "a miniature reef" of "up to 100 species from 13 phyla," and the poem decides that "the ancients weren't so crazy" to picture the world riding on such a back. A creature that can sleep for hours "its heart almost stopped" begins to seem like something between an animal and a small planet.
All this prepares the last stanza, where the turtle "drinks seawater & excretes the salt / from special glands / next to its eyes." Biologists, we are told, "caution us not / to anthropomorphise, this is not what it seems, / this copious weeping has nothing to do / with grief." The scientific point is accurate, and the poem accepts it. The comma splice in the middle, though, makes the warning sound slightly rushed, like someone talking over their own unease. And "grief" gets the shortest line of all, so it is the last word we see.
The poem's central idea seems to be that facts and feeling don't have to compete. Having read about the nets, the lights and the lost hatchlings, the reader arrives at the weeping turtle already carrying sorrow. The denial of grief only makes that sorrow more visible. The poem suggests that our urge to read grief into the animal's face may be a way of noticing what is happening to it, and perhaps of admitting our part in it. That is what makes "Loggerhead" memorable: it obeys the scientist and still lets the reader weep.