33 Environment poems

I remember the dusty floorboards of wood in the streetcar Of the Minneapolis Street Railway Company And the varnished yellow banquettes of tight-knit rattan Worn smooth by decades of passengers The worn gleaming brass grips at the corners of the seats And the motorman’s little bell Windows trembling in their casings as we crossed the avenue Liberty dimes falling softly into the steel-rimmed hour glass The gnarled hand of the motorman near. My grandmother arranged herself against the seat Her back as straight as a soldier’s beside me Her navy hat with velvet band And net veil down making her head seem distant, Her dreaming smile and the patient Roman nose, A repose so deep; from my place I watched her when we rode like princes Rattling past traffic stopped on the granite cobbles Riding downtown together, my hands in hers; All that so much That I love yet but feel no sadness for, that Time crossed out like the trolley tracks taken up Or entombed under the pliant blacktop of the modernized.

For Burn Construction Company When you were building the i -10 bypass, one of   your dozers, moving earth at the center of a great pit, slipped its thick blade beneath the water table, slicing into the earth’s wet palm, and the silt moistened beneath the huge thing’s tires, and the crew was sent home for the day. Next morning, water filled the pit. Nothing anyone could do to stop it coming. It was a revelation: kidney-shaped, deep green, there between the interstate and the sewage treatment plant. When nothing else worked, you called it a lake and opened it to the public. And we were the public.

One day the bees start wandering off, no one knows why. First one doesn’t come back, and then another and another, until those who are supposed to stay and guard the hive, those who are making the royal jelly and feeding it to the queen, those who form different parts of the great brain, must put down what it is they are doing and go off in search— having no choice, not if the hive is going to survive, and where do they go, each one vanishing, never to be seen again, off wandering in the wilderness, having forgotten how, forgotten what it was they were after, what it was that gave meaning, having known it at one time, now a veil drawn. Is it that each one is a cell, a brain cell, and now they’re failing one by one, plaque to Alzheimer’s, or the way the cells in the esophagus will begin to mimic the stomach if the acid is too intense, if you’re sleeping and the valve won’t close, a lifetime of eating and drinking the wrong things, those cells compensating, trying their best, but opening the door to those other cells, the wild ones, the ones that call those bees, out there, somewhere, lost, having nowhere to return at night, their search for nectar fruitful, their small saddlebags full, but no one to go home to, no home, no memory of home, it’s as if they’d stumbled into some alternate world, one looking like ours but just a glass width different, just a fraction of sunlight different, the patient waking up, finding herself wandering, someone leading her back to bed, but there is no bed. Confusion of the hive, they call it, and the hive dies, each bee goes down, each light goes out, one by one, blinking out all over town, seen from a great height as the night ages, darkens, as you’re parked in your car with your own true love, until it’s just you two and the stars, until it’s just you.

Underneath ice caps, once glacial peaks deer, elk, vixen begin to ascend. Free creatures camouflaged as waves and waves receding far from plains pulling upward slopes and faraway snow dusted mountains. On spotted and clear cut hills robbed of fir, high above wheat tapestried valleys, flood plains up where headwaters reside. Droplets pound, listen. Hoofed and pawed mammals pawing and hoofing themselves up, up. Along rivers dammed by chocolate beavers, trailed by salamanders—mud puppies. Plunging through currents, above concrete and steel man-made barriers these populations of plains, prairies, forests flee in such frenzy, popping splash dance, pillaging cattail zones, lashing lily pads— the breath of life in muddy ponds, still lakes. Liquid beads slide on windshield glass along cracked and shattered pane, spider-like with webs and prisms. “Look, there, the rainbow touched the ground both ends down!” Full arch seven colors showered, heed what Indigenous know, why long ago, they said no one belongs here, surrounding them, that this land was meant to be wet with waters of nearby not fertile to crops and domestic graze. The old ones said, “When the animals leave this place the waters will come again. This power is beyond the strength of man. The river will return with its greatest force.” No one can stop her. She was meant to be this way. Snakes in honor, do not intrude. The rainbow tied with red and green like that on petal rose, though only momentarily. Colors disappear like print photographs fade. They mix with charcoal surrounding. A flurry of fowl follow like strands, maidenhair falls, from blackened clouds above swarming inward covering the basin and raising sky. Darkness hangs over the hills appear as black water crests, blackness varying shades. The sun is somewhere farther than the farthest ridge . Main gravel crossroads and back back roads slicken to mud, clay. Turtles creep along rising banks, snapping jowls. Frogs chug throaty songs. The frogs only part of immense choir heralding the downpour, the falling oceans. Over the train trestle, suspension bridge with current so slick everything slides off in sheets. Among rotten stumps in black bass ponds, somewhere catfish reel in fins and crawl, walking whiskers to higher waters. Waters above, below the choir calling it forth. Brightly plumed jays and dull brown-headed cowbirds fly as if hung in one place like pinwheels. They dance toward the rain crest, the approaching storm beckoning, inviting, summoning. A single sparrow sings the stroke of rain past the strength of sunlight. The frog chorus sings refrain, melody drumming thunder, evoked by beasts and water creatures wanting their homes. Wanting to return to clearings and streams where ash, or white birch woods rise,    tower over, quaking aspen stand against storm shown veils—sheeting rains crossing pasture, meadow, hills, mountain. Sounds erupt. Gathering clouds converge, push, pull, push, pull forcing lightning back and forth shaping windy, sculptured swans, mallard ducks, and giants from stratocumulus media. As if they are a living cloud chamber, As if they exist only in the heavens. Air swells with dampness. It has begun.

The problem— it’s not been written yet, the omens: the headless owl, the bobcat struck, the red wolf where she could not be. None of it done and yet it’s over. Nothing yet of night     when she called me closer asked me to bring her crow painting to stay straight across from her feet so she could waken into it, remember her friend. Of Old Chief alongside her shoulder still watching over her just as the mountain had done throughout her Alberta childhood. The Pendleton shroud bearing our braids, her figure in flaming pyre. The cards, the notes, the tasks the things undone,     not done and she with us        faraway as this has always been    and ever will continue. We meet we leave we meld and vaporize from whatever it was that held us human in this life. And all the beautiful things that lead our thoughts and give us reason remain despite the leaving and all I know         is what you know when it is over said and done it was a time and there was never enough of it.

The first morning of Three Mile Island: those first disquieting, uncertain, mystifying hours. All morning a crew of workmen have been tearing the old decrepit roof off our building, and all morning, trying to distract myself, I’ve been wandering out to watch them as they hack away the leaden layers of asbestos paper and disassemble the disintegrating drains. After half a night of listening to the news, wondering how to know a hundred miles downwind if and when to make a run for it and where, then a coming bolt awake at seven when the roofers we’ve been waiting for since winter sent their ladders shrieking up our wall, we still know less than nothing: the utility company continues making little of the accident, the slick federal spokesmen still have their evasions in some semblance of order. Surely we suspect now we’re being lied to, but in the meantime, there are the roofers, setting winch-frames, sledging rounds of tar apart, and there I am, on the curb across, gawking. I never realized what brutal work it is, how matter-of-factly and harrowingly dangerous. The ladders flex and quiver, things skid from the edge, the materials are bulky and recalcitrant. When the rusty, antique nails are levered out, their heads pull off; the underroofing crumbles. Even the battered little furnace, roaring along as patient as a donkey, chokes and clogs, a dense, malignant smoke shoots up, and someone has to fiddle with a cock, then hammer it, before the gush and stench will deintensify, the dark, Dantean broth wearily subside. In its crucible, the stuff looks bland, like licorice, spill it, though, on your boots or coveralls, it sears, and everything is permeated with it, the furnace gunked with burst and half-burst bubbles, the men themselves so completely slashed and mucked they seem almost from another realm, like trolls. When they take their break, they leave their brooms standing at attention in the asphalt pails, work gloves clinging like Br’er Rabbit to the bitten shafts, and they slouch along the precipitous lip, the enormous sky behind them, the heavy noontime air alive with shimmers and mirages. Sometime in the afternoon I had to go inside: the advent of our vigil was upon us. However much we didn’t want to, however little we would do about it, we’d understood: we were going to perish of all this, if not now, then soon, if not soon, then someday. Someday, some final generation, hysterically aswarm beneath an atmosphere as unrelenting as rock, would rue us all, anathematize our earthly comforts, curse our surfeits and submissions. I think I know, though I might rather not, why my roofers stay so clear to me and why the rest, the terror of that time, the reflexive disbelief and distancing, all we should hold on to, dims so. I remember the president in his absurd protective booties, looking absolutely unafraid, the fool. I remember a woman on the front page glaring across the misty Susquehanna at those looming stacks. But, more vividly, the men, silvered with glitter from the shingles, clinging like starlings beneath the eaves. Even the leftover carats of tar in the gutter, so black they seemed to suck the light out of the air. By nightfall kids had come across them: every sidewalk on the block was scribbled with obscenities and hearts.

THE DEEP EVENING-COLORED ROSE of the sea is closing. Sweet crude oil, orange as rust, finds an open pathway into the marsh. And what you thought would be your home, lush with grasses, is no home, drives you out into the gray-glazed gates of sleep. Blood flowers where we don’t see it. And every chance event is a high note racing from stars in sea-depths of brightness, and every shock we feel we feel only with the slack ropes of our arms. Someone wants to hide the body of oil and cannot. Someone wants to hide their hands from shame. Shark, dolphin, manatee, fish, each slick skin an undreamt tine threading its red flute-dusk through fumes. Sound of the flood-dark pulse. Then the second when the water makes no sound. THE OLD VANDALS WERE FLOODS AND BOATS eroding the banks. The islands that once dotted the bays have sunk, disappearing into silverish grit, thinned into algae and filament now being made quiet by plumes. Despite ourselves we are made quiet. The death of the sea a thing we must lower ourselves into to imagine. I will stay with you here inside the sheen of orange that quickly kills, not like the saltwater slowly starving the freshwater- marshes and grasses that knit this green-wet world together. The two breathless gannets found covered in oil are not unlike you, at the mercy of a mercy that moves in plumes, that insists certain fates remain invisible. What existed before the oil arrived was delicate and mired, a broom of moonlight swept through half-choked waves. I trust you if you wish for what it, too, might have been. LEADING INTO THE BAY are soft green expanses of grasses, saltwater channels, slicks not glimpsed here before. The birds bathe where they can, in half-damp shadows that make possible the next free climb into air. There is nothing beyond our means to feel it— oil pushing up to the surface where the surface-dwellers die, turtles pulling in from the Gulf for nesting. If I close my eyes I can hear the faint blue traces of blood over-gathered by oil and the sound of ice near the seafloor. There will be a time when nothing living moves, a degradation of stillness beyond any liquid scar. Still, the solutions of despair are weak if you believe you can touch an undersea reef, the belly of a small wounded whale. You have the power to feel it. The breath of the animal moving like trust into your arms. BEFORE THE HOUR WHEN THE COAST slid into ocean we thought we saw a patch of sun greening in waves. The slip of a fish. There was a need so deep in our bodies we could not even weep. We called for an end and that end did not come. Power after power, our machine tools and cutting tools did nothing to hold back the brown clouds rippling in chaotic columns toward the light. And what the skies mean, passing over beds of tarred seaweed, feels unutterable, like the darkness around a candle. Where had we hoped to live? You came into the month with dreams. You walked on those beaches even though you knew they were sick. The bird that sought the reeds to die in, the fish gill-soaked with oils— you gathered them into yourself as if you alone could bring back their flickering. And overhead the novae exploded toward you along tracks of gas and dust, and the fields of ocean rose into you, and the crabs broke from their cancer fossils in masses of tiny flowers and you felt inside you the islands re-arise, flushed from the thickening imbalance of the earth. (Is there some refuge beyond ourselves that is vast enough? The sea is without grief. As are the days.)

i In view of the fading animals the proliferation of sewers and fears the sea clogging, the air nearing extinction we should be kind, we should take warning, we should forgive each other Instead we are opposite, we touch as though attacking, the gifts we bring even in good faith maybe warp in our hands to implements, to manoeuvres ii Put down the target of me you guard inside your binoculars, in turn I will surrender this aerial photograph (your vulnerable sections marked in red) I have found so useful See, we are alone in the dormant field, the snow that cannot be eaten or captured iii Here there are no armies here there is no money It is cold and getting colder, We need each others’ breathing, warmth, surviving is the only war we can afford, stay walking with me, there is almost time / if we can only make it as far as the (possibly) last summer

I close my eyes so that I can see it. What we so freely eliminate. Who is not guilty of it? We reek of paper. Everywhere we go is paper. Our hands are stained with paper. Walls. What echoes from our walls. The sweet whisper of rainforest— even the name makes the sound of rushing water or perhaps it’s a ghost that haunts us. They say the dead that did not die a peaceful death are doomed forever to wander the earth. But perhaps this earth is for them already a cemetery—stacks and stacks of flesh on a desk. Which one belongs to which tree? Already, we’ve traded oxygen for so much.

In memory of Dorothy Burns i. troppo allegro Remember seasons? Seem to recall those once were easier. Reasonably sequenced, regal of tempo and temper, Reliable change flipped heads-over-tails each quarter, Recovering the hemisphere with four fine suits, knock-off designer. Recently, someone shuffled, cut the deck into disorder: Relapse, tic, hiccup, snap, weeks reissued like hipster Rediscoveries    ...    join the club! No closer Reading required to diagnose this crazy weather: Record highs, flourishing lows. April even crueler Recapitulated each fortnight. Spring hailing like a howitzer. Reek of summer tickling autumn’s automatic sprinkler. Redder-neck sunbathers burnt by November’s toaster. A warbler Retweeting Keats, well into winter. A death for Easter. ii. funeral: march Remember: misremembering that fishy Faulkner Remark,the dead are never passed. Ask: will this chapter Retain familiar cycles? Lather, rinse, repeat. Swelter, Reins, release. Welter, ruins, reseed. Seconds per Revolution: top-heavy spinning, simian moods over- Reaching from swing to swing. For reveler, Read revelator: elevator going upper, downer, Results of a heart dialed three degrees warmer. Remedial Ecclesiastes: a time for X, and a-whole-nother Reciprocal time for X’s refrain, a dinner Reservation for six — make that five — and an altogether Regrettable time for the long and short divisions of disaster. Remainder:only a matter of time. No more time to matter. iii. scherzo: presto chango “Remember, the world’s stage was not set for your metaphor, Christopher Rex, tragicomic motherfucker: Recognize, why don’t you, your relish for the realish, for hinter-gatherer Relationships between the dank diamond mine of  your inner Resources and the Real World (remember that?), our fixer-upper Residence imperiled enough without your cheesier Regrets stinking up the joint — shoulda, coulda, woulda, Gouda. Character Reassessment sure is fun, but don’t run down the theater. Regards, Responsive Reader / Longtime Listener / Other: _______ ” (Re: that critique, one childhood scene I’ll offer: Relatives teasingly wondered why my “gatekeeper,” Regulator of mind and mouth, would wander Regularly away from his post. Still no answer.) iv. finale: re-fugue Remember with me (it’s not all mine to remember), Remind me, under this never-better weather, whether, if ever, “Real time” and its dead-ahead march to an unlucky number Really feel right as a royal flush, since time seems so much fairer Rewound — recoiling counterclockwise, the seasons’ order Restoring, entropy decreasing, days un creasing — now faster, Regress infinitely, till the Spaide family tree, our off-kilter Calder, Recollects its fallen leaves — relief, pains, laughter, Reverse it,past, even, it’s not— trust I tamper Respectfully, gatekeeper, but why not even further, Reductio ad absurdum, back to the very scene I enter Rehearsal, ninety-nine degrees, summer-hot, set to simmer, Ready or not, on the twenty-first day of December?