33 Environment poems

The labeled bins on the California hillside catch the glint and quarter-glint of passing cars. Families pull up with their interesting trash and start unloading: Here, sweetheart, this goes over in Newspaper. The bundle hits with a thud. Diet soda cans spin almost noiselessly down, and the sun- permitting bottles from a day’s pleasure are tossed into Mixed Glass by the children who like to hear the smash, unknowable, chaotic, as matter greets itself and starts to change. What mystery is inside a thing! If we peered into the bin, we could see it waiting there, could believe everything is alive and specific and personal, could tell by the tilt of one bottle against the next that it’s difficult to be singular, to have identity, to keep an outline safe in the terrors of space. Even the child knows this. Bye, bottle! she shouts, tossing it in; and the bottle lies there in the two o’clock position, temporarily itself, before being swept into the destiny of mixture. . . And what if some don’t want to. What if some items in the piles of paper, the orange and blue envelopes from a magazine sweepstakes, numbers pressing through the cloudy windows with our names, some among those pale sheets curled with moisture, would rather stay as they are. It’s spring; we’ve thrown away mistakes— tax forms, recipes, tennis-ball-sized drafts of poems—that which was blank shall be made blank again—but what if that failed letter wants to be a failure, not go back to pulp, and thought .. . Or across the parking lot, where light insists on changing the dull cans, a few cans don’t want to be changed, though they should want to, shouldn’t they, should want to be changed by light, light which is called sweet reason, honeyed, spectra, magnitude, light that goes from the parking lot looking helpless though it is matter that has been betrayed. . . All afternoon the bins are carried off by those who know about where things should go, who are used to the clatter the cans make, pouring out; and the families, who believed change would heal them are pulling away in their vans, slightly embarrassed by that which refused . . . The bins fill again with hard substances, the hills bear down with their fugitive gold, the pampas grass bending low to protect what was briefly certain and alive with hope.

What will we do when there is nobody left to kill? * 40,000 gallons of oil gushing into the ocean But I sit on top this mountainside above the Pacific checking out the flowers the California poppies orange as I meet myself in heat I’m wondering where’s the Indians? all this filmstrip territory all this cowboy sagaland: not a single Indian in sight 40,000 gallons gushing up poison from the deepest seabeds every hour 40,000 gallons while experts international while new pollutants swallow the unfathomable still: no Indians I’m staring hard around me past the pinks the poppies and the precipice that let me see the wide Pacific unsuspecting even trivial by virtue of its vast surrender I am a woman searching for her savagery even if it’s doomed Where are the Indians? * Crow Nose Little Bear Slim Girl Black Elk Fox Belly the people of the sacred trees and rivers precious to the stars that told old stories to the night how do we follow after you? falling snow before the firelight and buffalo as brothers to the man how do we follow into that? * They found her facedown where she would be dancing to the shadow drums that humble birds to silent flight They found her body held its life dispelled by ice my life burns to destroy Anna Mae Pictou Aquash slain on The Trail of Broken Treaties bullet lodged in her brain/hands and fingertips dismembered who won the only peace that cannot pass from mouth to mouth * Memory should agitate the pierced bone crack of one in pushed-back horror pushed-back pain as when I call out looking for my face among the wounded coins to toss about or out entirely the legends of Geronimo of Pocahontas now become a squat pedestrian cement inside the tomb of all my trust as when I feel you isolate among the hungers of the trees a trembling hidden tinder so long unsolicited by flame as when I accept my sister dead when there should be a fluid holiness of spirits wrapped around the world redeemed by women whispering communion * I find my way by following your spine Your heart indivisible from my real wish we compelled the moon into the evening when you said, “No, I will not let go of your hand.” * Now I am diving for a tide to take me everywhere Below the soft Pacific spoils a purple girdling of the globe impregnable * Last year the South African Minister of Justice described Anti-Government Disturbances as Part of a Worldwide Trend toward the Breakdown of Established Political and Cultural Orders * God knows I hope he’s right.

what will be left after the last fidget spinner’s spun its last spin after the billboards accrue their thick layer of grit masking advertisements for teeth paste & tanqueray gin after the highways are overtaken by invasive forests after the ministers give up their gods & the rabbis their congregations for drink after new men rise to lead us sheep toward our shearing, to make bed sheets from our hair after the high towers have no airplanes to warn away & instead blink purely toward heaven like children with one red eye after phone lines do nothing but cut the sky into sheet music & our phones are just expensive bricks of metal & glass after our cloud of photographs collapses & all memories retreat back into their privatized skulls after the water taps gasp out their final blessing what then? when even the local militias run out of ammunitions when the blast radii have been chalked & the missiles do all they were built to when us jews have given up our state for that much older country of walking & then that even older religion of dirt when all have succumbed to illness inside the church of our gutted pharmacies when the seas eat their cities when the ground splits like a dress when the trash continent in the mid-atlantic at last opens its mouth to spit what will be left after we’ve left i dare not consider it instead dance with me a moment late in this last extinction that you are reading this must be enough

Around the pool the hippos drool as if the chloride wouldn’t kill them. In fact, they like to play the fool, the harbinger, the pilgrim. The bird that plops into the glass makes a sound, then isn’t there. Spiders toss, in oleaginous mass, Goo Gone into the air. The ants that drag a beat-up car onto the lawn are emissaries of some forgotten prince or tsar from an HBO miniseries. The cheetah, panther, jaguar, and lynx (some of these might be the same) conjure images of Sphinx and other trademarked names. The dynamited hole now teems with insects shiny and obscene, crawling, dying, though it dreams an ectoplasm of green. My own two cats stiffen, confused at this profusion past the door. They bat at things they’ve often used for sound therapy before. I tell you this out of principle: that spiraling around a theme (while naming lots of animals) can supercharge a meme. My own skin founders in the rush of allergenic, if cautious, beasts. Eyes eye darkness, ears hear hush — the assassin’s humor feasts.

NYTimes headline for September 4th 2012: Elephants Dying in Epic Frenzy As Ivory Fuels Wars and Profits They return to the site whence they came with eyes tearful, with psalms trumpeting the air. They stand ever so watchful; guarding the graves of their ghosts and their kind. They shall not forget.  They shall not want. They lie down in green silky pastures and finding their way to the still waters. They restore and nourish their soul. They walk through the dark valleys; always the shadows of death lurking behind them. Always striding till they reach the comforting light. They fear no evil.  Man fears. They forage for food and they eat amongst their enemies because they fear not.  They are the happiest. The honey is under their tongue. The winter is past, the rain is over and gone. Their hearts awaken.  They know no violence. Even in the waning light they tower over all else. They are the landscape.  They are the trees. They throw up the dust in their dance.  The skies become misty. They rise up and lead each other away into the dusk.

Out the living-room window I see the two older children burning household trash under the ash tree in wind and rain. They move in slow motion about the flames, heads bowed in concentration as they feed each fresh piece in, hair blown wild across their faces, the fire wavering in tongues before them so they seem creatures half flame, half flesh, wholly separate from me. All of a sudden the baby breaks slowly down through the flexed branches of the ash in a blaze of blood and green leaves, an amniotic drench, a gleaming liver-purple slop of ripe placenta, head first and wailing to be amongst us. Boy and girl look up in silence and hold gravely out flamefeathered arms to catch her, who lands on her back in their linked and ashen hands. Later, when I take her in my arms for a walk to that turn on the high road where the sea always startles, I can see how at intervals she's thunderstruck by a scalloped green leaf, a shivering jig of grassheads, or that speckled bee that pushes itself among the purple and scarlet parts of a fuchsia bell. And her eyes are on fire.

herds of buffalo gone now you search the undulating sea of grass near campo and wildhorse for the great hairy horned whales but none surface instead if you look carefully you see the shallow swimming hahe issi the pronghorn antelope you identify with this striped sailfish skimming the surface a harpoon’s throw away from hungry nesters diving for the cereal great plains plankton seed visible but fast

If  you give money to an animal He or she gets cloying and aggressive But when arrested for that behavior Says, “I didn’t know anything, my reps Did it. Well they did. These humans Committed their tiny crimes in the mail,” it says, “Knowing animals are photogenic. You can hold One in your lap or hold a sheaf of  photos In which a feline looks like you yourself  tearing off a leg Of a springbok antelope, which prey looks like you Concentrating on the flee instinct,” it says. I tend to agree with it. It and All of them have expressions on their faces, four limbs, Two eyes, noses, ears, etcetera, how close can you get to you Or me, and then there’s the same insides. If  it is a cheetah Do not put it in your lap. If  it’s A black rhino it weighs 2,250 lbs. And has two! sharp horns about 24 in. ea.! Let’s suppose nothing about that one and not say It has a facial expression. My own opinion Is it will have one in a matter of time. There are ten other scenes in which I look like the animals In them so don’t argue I’m writing yet another check this week And as a matter of fact I’d like to smack something, Bite it, and cook it. You do that, tonight For instance. If one of us eats the other It’s a very big crime Not tiny like the revolutionary revelation in a solicitation That we are like the animals, no,are them, Which is bigger in evolution and spirituality, Sure, and in the final accounting Much more important, but today Don’t put a cheetah in your lap and don’t eat other humans.

That it was shy when alive goes without saying. We know it vanished at the sound of voices Or footsteps. It took wing at the slightest noises, Though it could be approached by someone praying. We have no recordings of it, though of course In the basement of the Museum, we have some stuffed Moth-eaten specimens—the Lesser Ruffed And Yellow Spotted—filed in narrow drawers. But its song is lost. If it was related to A species of Quiet, or of another feather, No researcher can know. Not even whether A breeding pair still nests deep in the bayou, Where legend has it some once common bird Decades ago was first not seen, not heard.

Try to remember: things go wrong in spite of it all. I listen to our daughters singing in the crackling rows of corn and wonder why I don't love them more. They move like dark birds, small mouths open to the sky and hungry. All afternoon I listen to the highway and watch clouds push down over the hills. I remember your legs, heavy with sleep, lying across mine. I remember when the world was transparent, trembling, all shattering light. I had to grit my teeth against its brilliance. It was nothing like this stillness that makes it difficult to lift my eyes. When I finally do, I see you carrying the girls over the sharp stones of the creek bed. When they pull at my clothes and lean against my arms, I don't know what to do and do nothing.