Erasure based on “The Future is Trashion” by Vanessa Friedman. New York Times. December 26, 2019.
Tag: environmental poetry
Cooing & Longing
Cooing
A bird perched on the fence for a minute—
its cooing brought me out of the house.
There was so much color on its feathers.
Its beak didn’t jut forward but bent downward
like in most of birds of prey, but this one didn’t prey.
I couldn’t feed it so it left sooner
than it used to when you were here, no grains
to litter the compound with, but then
there was no kind of fodder in the house.
It was the kind of bird that knew its beauty—
perhaps a special thing for its species.
I had thought it would cut me some slack,
but, like you, it didn’t, fleeing on instinct;
like you, it left a trail of leaves in its wake.
Longing
I remember the first dry season I spent
in that house you lived in until you died.
Harmattan almost bent you double,
dragging in its dusty perfume across miles
and into every room, sparing nothing
so much so I never knew I would ever
be so expectant of rain; even the birds,
the animals were having a hard time
of all the charade that was the weather.
Even the wooden shelves cried as they cracked,
their grains warping into undulant hills.
I was addicted to the city life.
I tried to hide my feelings because
somehow the weather benefitted you.
You had never so stood at the window
with such longing, in your eyes, to be outside.
I looked into your clear brown eyes and tried
to will the young agile person I knew
who would walk miles with me merely to see
what the landscape was like at the moment
because, for you, no one stepped into
the same landscape twice, for you the wind
was always changing something, eroding
either the soil, or the trees of their leaves,
the rain would always wash something away;
even the cities could not escape this.
It was like a process of aging.
Sometimes the wind brought more than dust
and its empty smell: now a sweet smell
but one which you doubted: maybe it was
the smell of bodies carried over miles,
maybe the dust was part of their bodies.
I knew it couldn’t be real yet I let
myself to imagine it, as scary
as it was, for didn’t we hear about how
the rivers, though how dried up they were,
still vomited tumescent bodies
from their silvery bellies, about how
the beggars didn’t wake up in the streets,
their stiff bodies curled up like balls of wool?
I tried to find things to love in this place
but couldn’t, rather reasons to leave
were monthly stacking. Minna was almost
like this and each day the people I stayed with
tried to convince me to cut the place some slack,
I took a piece of my clothing and quietly
folded it and threw it in my traveling bag
until one night I realized it was full.
Pollarding & Animal Spirits
Pollarding
In this unwitting dawn. In the begonia
I put in the poem because of its incantatory
sound. In the vine I thought was a sweet
pea—to put a sweet pea in the poem—
but was actually a weed, common vetch.
In the still early summer heat like gentle
pressure on the forearms and wrists.
A trio of military planes screams overhead.
I squint into the glare and the leftover
cosmetic product on my hands flashes
in a type of dim recognition. Wash it off. Who
is going to read about botanical misprision.
There’s a war on and I am the yellowing
pages of Bishop’s National Geographic.
There’s always a war on and its location
is not a function of place but of people, plucked
for the vase or the oven, wilting or burning or
eaten as a delicacy. The word of the day
is upward. The word of the day is all cops
are bastards. Who am I to say what we should make
of the clay at our feet, minor gods with shovels
and grass seed, with kilns and molds, the joints of
our fingers curling around some texture, releasing
it in the checkout aisle or through the window
that backs the checkout aisle.
After adrenaline, a comedown just like any
other high. You’re sitting on the floor in a hoodie
and biting all the skin off your lips. Outside,
the day continues to mulch itself, there are
robins, someone is invoicing someone else
for another order of rubber bullets.
The symbolic vulture will not arrive
To hunch in the middle distance. Sorry,
I’m back now, I was on the patio this whole time,
my mouth is bleeding and the roar has faded
such that it might be mistaken for an air conditioner,
the mechanical hum of comfort
in deeply inhospitable environments,
a fueled and speedy monarchy, it’s coming,
I tell myself, get up, it’s well-rested and armed
to the teeth literally but also and importantly
for my purposes metaphorically, a giant blossoming
of dipshit noisemaking. It doesn’t have to go
to the office and it is responsible for the existence
of Phoenix, Arizona. I wobble on my feet
like a newborn anything. I am melancholic
about structures. Look: no matter what you grab
out of the kitchen drawer, it can be used
as a lever. In what follows, we’re on the side
of the ice, those tropical begonias be damned.
Animal Spirits
“If the animal spirits are dimmed and the spontaneous optimism falters, leaving us to depend on nothing but a mathematical expectation, enterprise will fade and die.” —John Maynard Keynes
Enterprise withering on the vine. Enterprise left to rot in the sun.
Out of its carcass, a cooler wind—
/ / /
If the world is bad to you, you are sad.
If the world is good to you, but you know about the world, you are sad.
If the world is good to you, and you do not know about the world, you will not be sad.
If the world was bad to you but it is no longer, it is easy to forget about the world, and easy to
forget you were ever sad.
O dripping globe. What we’ve blamed
on the elements. On the accident
of our cells rather than the rapidity
with which we turn water to cement.
/ / /
The idea that the brain is the seat of the soul is older than most people think it is.
The history of naturalizing economic activity is exactly as long as you think it is.
We were made for money / / we were made of money
/ / /
Falling through a substrate,
the gentle “u” of the body as it faces upward. The hands and feet like a dancer’s, directional.
On the curb, a man turns over shovelfuls of dampened sand in a wheelbarrow. The sound is like
stiff fabrics hung too close to one another on a line. A recursive intimacy.
A brief and wild optimism, and then the grinding sludge of machinery, its unmatchable
excitation.
/ / /
A bull in the blood.
A bull made of blood, made of air, air carried in the blood air seated in the brain.
The brain a bull. The world a bull with its hooves on the world.
O beast that could be gentle. Asleep in the beige autumn of the shaken head, slow wading
through the pool of counter-liquefaction.
Abolish selling.
In the hand outstretched, these cool bristles
like a hand broom, a horned smoothness and the scent
of fields and a fire recently extinguished. This animal pause.
/ / /
Frenzied acquisition of undergarments,
small vases, linens, soaps, followed by the hatred of stuff—
/ / /
The dog on the surface of the water, the dog on the silver of the coin.1
1See Robert Burton, in Anatomy of Melancholy, on rabidity: “That in Hydrophobia they seem to see the picture of a dog still in their water” (222).
Invasive
Then there was no more singing.
All the lights in their throats cut:
the protest of evening wolves & black
bears nuzzling a parched creek for any-
thing that might sustain them another
white-skinned winter, those foreign
birds we never learned the names for.
Invasive, my grandfather called them.
Like the silver carp haunting our
local river. Bullfrogs & possums.
He called us natives after living
three generations on the same
hard land it took so much blood
to own. At the end of the path
the bullet takes to meet the right
body, the right body drops like
nothing worth losing sleep over.
It’ll cost two men three hours
to drag it home in one piece.
That wilder silence lasts but
a brief eternity. Before the unseen
choir shakes the forest. Again,
the same damn wolves & starlings. Men
still dragging. The season closing.
Its wiry legs kick & quiver in our hands.
Like strings. Song. Our song now to sing.
Long Marriage (Parable of the Skull)
Over years we lifted it sometimes
from its cardboard box, studying
the fifty teeth and gazing into the open
eye sockets, this possum skull we found
in our sixth year, half-buried in the dirt
behind the rental house. For decades, then,
we moved it everywhere we went,
and always it lay quietly, as patient as dirt,
and only now and then did I imagine it
dreaming that skin formed once more around
its body—the moon face and moon tail—
so it might waddle again along the river.
This poem was originally published in The Florida Review (43.2, Fall 2019) and was a runner-up in the Humboldt Poetry Prize.
Notes on Pet Monkeys and How to Manage Them
I. CAGE ITEMS
This box should be fairly heavy. The door
never needs opened or undone. Bend the rim
into a square. Little danger to your
self—the room to be afforded him.
A looking glass hung up by a small chain—
your pet’s vanity exceeds belief. A
flimsily made affair is soon bitten
to pieces. Body of a cage. Many a
good monkey is killed by swallowing
fragments of glass. Rub on a coat of
maroon. A little ornamental topping.
Or Venetian Red, most suitable of
colors for a cage. All that remains
is to procure your monkey and put him in.
II. CLASSIFICATION
From the time my fingers were big enough
to manufacture fly-cages with hollowed
cork and pins—all other lines of
fancy well threshed out—Simians have held
great fascination. The schoolboy’s definition
is “the plural of monk.” Or humonculous.
Much is lacking in what might have been
told. I cannot pin. Great naturalists
have labored to show a relationship.
I cannot pin my credibility.
Below the average human idiot’s,
the head of a chimpanzee. I am drifting.
What might have been. A fertile source of
drollery. My fingers were big enough.
III. AILMENTS
Disease—Symptoms of Indisposition—
Quinsy—Good Riddance—a small apple
hollowed out—Toothache—Headache—treat him
as you would a child—Useful Article—
as you would—Broken Limbs—a human
being—Rheumatism—Rupture—Risk of
Being Bitten—first he should be en-
veloped—Treatment—in a bag—Costive-
ness—Biliousness—Monkeys Eating Their
Own Tails—a ready sale is better than
the nuisance—Excrement—the “Kill or Cure”
Treatment—treat him as you would a human
being—Simple Remedies—a small apple hollowed
out and plugged again is greedily devoured
IV. CONCLUDING OBSERVATIONS
Savagely grabbed, the hand that has fed and
petted him all along. The very moment
novelty is lost, sit and write off an
advertisement to Exchange and Mart,
Bazaar. I haven’t always had the heart.
A passing menagerie generally
has a vacant cage. With an iron bar
a sharp and heavy blow. An exceedingly
human-like affair. As if we all of us
come at last to this. In skinning him
yourself you’ll find his hide fairly tough.
Put him in a natural posture. A bit
of dried moss, artificial leaf you might
purchase at the milliners. Keep him in full light.
The source material for these pieces is Notes on Pet Monkeys and How to Manage Them, Arthur Patterson’s 1888 handbook, which was published in response to the colonialist British fashion of adopting exotic animals without any idea of how to properly provide care for them. These poems erase and rearrange the text into sonnet form. The poems were originally published in The Florida Review (43.2, Fall 2019) and were the winner of the Humboldt Poetry Prize.