33 Environment poems

I am the Earth And the Earth is me. Each blade of grass, Each honey tree, Each bit of mud, And stick and stone Is blood and muscle, Skin and bone. And just as I Need every bit Of me to make My body fit, So Earth needs Grass and stone and tree And things that grow here Naturally. That’s why we Celebrate this day. That’s why across The world we say: As long as life, As dear, as free, I am the Earth And the Earth is me.

Offer your usual posy of goatheads. Proffer sharp garlands of thistle & Incas’ thin down; of squash bugs strung on blighted stems; send back necklaced every reeking pearl I crushed, each egg cluster that I scraped away with knife or twig or thumbnail. Wake me sweat-laced from a dream of hidden stables: the gentle foals atremble, stem-legged, long-neglected. Dear drought our summer’s corn was overrun again with weed & cheat; the bitter zinnias fell to bits. Dear yearlings our harvest is lattice & husk.

The biography of the bee is written in honey and is drawing to a close. Soon the buzzing plainchant of summer will be silenced for good; the flowers, unkindled will blaze one last time and go out. And the boy nursing his stung ankle this morning will look back at his brief tears with something like regret, remembering the amber taste of honey.

We dreamed of glowing children, their throats alive and cancerous, their eyes like lightning in the dark. We were uneasy in our skins, sixth grade, a year for blowing up, for learning that nothing contains that heat which comes from growing, the way our parents seemed at once both tall as cooling towers and crushed beneath the pressure of small things— family dinners, the evening news, the dead voice of the dial tone. Even the ground was ticking. The parts that grew grew poison. Whatever we ate became a stone. Whatever we said was love became plutonium, became a spark of panic in the buried world.

One will live to see the Caterpillar rut everything they walk on—seacliff buckwheat cleared, relentless ice plant to replace it, the wild fields bisected by the scenic highway, canyons covered with cul-de-sacs, gas stations, comfortable homes, the whole habitat along this coastal stretch endangered, everything, everyone, everywhere in it danger as well— but now they're logging the one stilling hawk Smith sights, the conspiring grasses' shh shhhh ssh, the coreopsis Mattoni's boot barely spares, and, netted, a solitary blue butterfly. Smith ahead of him chasing the stream, Mattoni wonders if he plans to swim again. Just like that the spell breaks. It's years later, Mattoni lecturing on his struggling butterfly. How fragile. • If his daughter spooled out the fabric she's chosen for her wedding gown, raw taffeta, burled, a bright hued tan, perhaps Mattoni would remember how those dunes looked from a distance, the fabric, balanced between her arms, making valleys in the valley, the fan above her mimicking the breeze. He and his friend loved everything softly undulating under the coyest wind, and the rough truth as they walked through the land's scratch and scrabble and no one was there, then, besides Mattoni and his friend, walking along Dolan's Creek, in that part of California they hated to share. The ocean, a mile or so off, anything but passive so that even there, in the canyon, they sometimes heard it smack and pull well-braced rocks. The breeze, basic: salty, bitter, sour, sweet. Smith trying to identify the scent, tearing leaves of manzanita, yelling: "This is it. Here! This is it!" his hand to his nose, his eyes, having finally seen the source of his pleasure, alive. • In the lab, after the accident, he remembered it, the butterfly. How good a swimmer Smith had been, how rough the currents there at Half Moon Bay, his friend alone with reel and rod—Mattoni back at school early that year, his summer finished too soon— then all of them together in the sneaker wave, and before that the ridge, congregations of pinking blossoms, and one of them bowing, scaring up the living, the frail and flighty beast too beautiful to never be pinned, those nights Mattoni worked without his friend, he remembered too. He called the butterfly Smith's Blue.

Our fathers did but use the world before, And having used did leave the same to us. We spill whatever resteth to their store. What can our heirs inherit but our curse? For we have sucked the sweet and sap away, And sowed consumption in the fruitful ground; The woods and forests clad in rich array With nakedness and baldness we confound. We have defaced the lasting monuments, And caused all honour to have end with us; The holy temples feel our ravishments. What can our heirs inherit but our curse? The world must end, for men are so accurst; Unless God end it sooner, they will first.

Amidst the too much that we buy and throw away and the far too much we wrap it in, the bear found a few items of special interest—a honeydew rind, a used tampon, the bone from a leg of lamb. He’d rock back lightly onto his rear paws and slash open a plastic bag, and then his nose— jammed almost with a surfeit of rank and likely information, for he would pause— and then his whole dowsing snout would insinuate itself a little way inside. By now he’d have hunched his weight forward slightly, and then he’d snatch it back, trailed by some tidbit in his teeth. He’d look around. What a good boy am he. The guardian of the dump was used to this and not amused. “He’ll drag that shit every which damn way,” he grumbled who’d dozed and scraped a pit to keep that shit where the town paid to contain it. The others of us looked and looked. “City folks like you don’t get to see this often,” one year-round resident accused me. Some winter I’ll bring him down to learn to love a rat working a length of subway track. “Nope,” I replied. Just then the bear decamped for the woods with a marl of grease and slather in his mouth and on his snout, picking up speed, not cute (nor had he been cute before, slavering with greed, his weight all sunk to his seated rump and his nose stuck up to sift the rich and fetid air, shaped like a huge, furry pear), but richly fed on the slow-simmering dump, and gone into the bug-thick woods and anecdote.

The drunk mechanic is happy to be in the ditch. From the tavern, five minutes through the dark field and you’re home. But first, there’s the cool grass to enjoy, and the mechanic will sleep here till dawn. A few feet away, the red and black sign that rises from the field: if you’re too close, you can’t read it, it’s that big. At this hour, it’s still wet dew. Later, the streets will cover it with dust, as it covers the bushes. The mechanic, beneath it, stretches in sleep. Silence is total. Shortly, in the warmth of the sun, one car after another will pass, waking the dust. At the top of the hill they slow down for the curve, then plunge down the slope. A few of the cars stop at the garage, in the dust, to drink a few liters. At this time of the morning, the mechanics, still dazed, will be sitting on oil drums, waiting for work. It’s a pleasure to spend the morning sitting in the shade, where the stink of oil’s cut with the smell of green, of tobacco, of wine, and where work comes to them, right to the door. Sometimes it’s even amusing: peasants’ wives come to scold them, blaming the garage for the traffic—it frightens the animals and women— and for making their husbands look sullen: quick trips down the hill into Turin that lighten their wallets. Between laughing and selling gas, one of them will pause: these fields, it’s plain to see, are covered with road dust, if you try to sit on the grass, it’ll drive you away. On the hillside, there’s a vineyard he prefers to all others, and in the end he’ll marry that vineyard and the sweet girl who comes with it, and he’ll go out in the sun to work, but now with a hoe, and his neck will turn brown, and he’ll drink wine pressed on fall evenings from his own grapes. Cars pass during the night, too, but more quietly, so quiet the drunk in the ditch hasn’t woken. At night they don’t raise much dust, and the beams of their headlights, as they round the curve, reveal in full the sign in the field. Near dawn, they glide cautiously along, you can’t hear a thing except maybe the breeze, and from the top of the hill they disappear into the plain, sinking in shadows.

When we are out of gas, a headache haloes the roof, darkening the skin of everyone who has a full tank. I was told that the nectar of shoelaces, if squeezed hard enough, turns to water and trickles from the caribou’s snout. A glacier nibbled from its center spiders a story of the Southern Cross, twin brothers dancing in the back room lit with cigarettes break through the drum’s soft skin— There bone faces atlas a grieving century.

Everyone burned coal in our neighborhood, soft coal they called it from the mountains of western Pennsylvania where my father grew up and fled as soon as he could, where my Welsh cousins dug it down in the dark. The furnace it fed stood in the dank basement, its many arms upraised like Godzilla or some other monster. It was my job to pull out clinkers and carry them to the alley bin. Mornings were chilly, frost on windows etching magic landscapes.  I liked to stand over the hot air registers the warmth blowing up my skirts. But the basement scared me at night. The fire glowed like a red eye through the furnace door and the clinkers fell loud and the shadows came at me as mice scampered.  The washing machine was tame but the furnace was always hungry.