Being human signifies, for each one of us, belonging to a class, a society, a country,

a continent and a civilization; and for us European earth-dwellers, the adventure

played out in the heart of the New World signifies in the first place that it was not

our world and that we bear responsibility for the crime of its destruction.

 – Claude Levi-Strauss

 

1. let us breed

            ecstatic in knowing/ in light of surrender make

unanimity with the magic that binds us or go straight apart

from bounding to that universe of stars or tucked in our beds

            in sullen dream state disavowing

 

or reckoning with what makes us & no noise

at all but shifts our chairs into forests’ flames            or toppled

surging waters engulf us & indominable waves complete

our comprehension alongside submerged

 

& blind to this tiny world’s crisis – while some of the richest

rocket up & away/ anticipative –

 

& as to fiery hills beyond bluffs

engendered & measured by our puerile cravings / our codes

standards & expectations so that even cosmic radiance

 

– traveling the ferocious speed of eleven million miles

a minute –

 

takes hours & weeks & months & years to cross

the divide of perception & understanding & politics & yet

beasts & vines & flowers & lichens & mosses on stones – this watchful

 

republic this elemental terrain of enchantment/ meta-animism

if we’re paying attention – articulate passions as magistrates of carnal

justice when pragmatism in our catholic conscience

falls so far short the mark                   & will we eat

 

their flesh & build our house from living

boulders & bones – in calcium substrate – rest our shoulders

            against slain bodies post-hunt

sans thanksgiving – blessing in our trespass our oblivious

invasion overwhelming burrow & den & nest           or more broadly

in the burdening melt of rising tides

 

///

 

still      I’m not weighing in against the killing of one animal

to sustain another nor truly the casualties

            of destruction for our world will continue

without us       & I’m not        & you know we’re all

 

///

 

& yet we are cadence upon cadence/ we do neither

            evil nor good               nor is there

morality in pulse & tempo – the true sin done

is with disregard – but permit us prayer for those creatures

that bear us up             comfort & shore us

 

Even if technical or medical hurdles remain, wouldn’t you be happy to go to Mars?

– Jay C. Buckey, for The Scientist, Volume 19, Issue 6, 20, March 28, 2005

 

1. & in our solar system we’re dwarfed

            out of recognition

at six thousand million miles from here to the farthest known

 

planet – to Neptune’s orbit – except we consider

by the distant stars the puniness of our own frail Copernican

complex – its planets & movements – notwithstanding today’s good

 

news from the Summit/ rich nations send strong signals

to the poorer as asylum seekers flee floods & droughts & tribal &

religious wars              still      some walk out in moonless night

            looking up       up        to star shine

 

that keeps & survives              living on its own rays

 

///

 

* there are two thousand colors attested in an atom of light *

* the same hues prevail in an iron bar warmed in the lab *

 

– & so a common chemistry & physics cuts through

everything & light is as fundamental to celestial bodies as clay

 

is to Earth –

 

yet historiography runs a linear path so

historians tell us & we should know we’re the product of step-by-step

of three-aeon degrees of pre-history

 

* Iron Age follows Bronze follows Stone *

* & my grandfather– a boilermaker in his prime – builds locomotive engines *

* & once I welded sculptures from plate steel *

 

& yet returning to the Milky Way’s twinkling

spine – travelling five thousand years to reach us – I hear a reporter ask

& a woman answer: if I stay here in my country I will die

& my children                        

 

& she maps & plans & plans

& she hopes & prays & plans & dreams        & she keeps     on

 

& just last year we decided we’d send people

to Mars within thirty years & as for dangers of galactic cosmic

 

radiation/ atomic nucleic energy in space

            mostly ricochets off

earth’s magnetic field but such divergence is lost in interplanetary

            travel leaving spacecraft unprotected & impairing our nervous

systems everyone shining so hot glowing by their own luminescence

 

& will we

 

spill our fevered brilliance into space in abundance just as polished

stars pour out hundreds of millions of tons of light

every second & in the terror of our burning planet

 

will we welcome

 

all risks/ departing this wrecked old

 

& giving in  the fallen/ in rising heat & pressure subjacent

in polyphonic wrench             & relief

– puffing the surviving tiny spider from the tip of a finger –

 

if it’s not already too late/ solstice sun blazing         

will we learn mercy

early as mercy’s adjured – ransom our own breath –

 

& will we safeguard our necessary devotions/ & quench the warrens

            of our thirsty human hearts

 

Part of the terror is to take back our own listening, to use our own voice, to see our own light.

– Hildegard of Bingen

 

iii. & in Buckingham County at Union Hill

            a fine little town held off

a massive polluting pipeline compressor

station on the very land on which generations of ancestors

 

slaved & later settled backed by long memories of February 25^th

1869 when arsonists burned our courthouse & destroyed

enslavement records & any proof that those captives those

            letter day pilgrims                   ever even existed

 

///

 

but listening with clear vision / sort a stock-taking elevated

            & alive in infernos raging the night’s labral bowl

in gemmed brilliance              fill us              listening listening

            to the dawn’s grained rapture / to what we know

to what we see of breach                    & rupture

 

///

 

& then the Air Pollution Control Board omitted environmental

justice reviews/ health impacts

of gas turbines             & the power corporation

refuted foundational narratives of Freedmen-founded & -built

so & the villagers went door-to-door & heirs & inheritors said their stories

they fought                  they fought

 

Flashy people may burlesque these things.

– Cotton Mather 1702

 

1. & still & yet embraced

in the Western gaze in this black season of stone

-limned grottos/ in holy caves of combatants in fast

 

            from liars & opportunists & from end back

to nurse & cradle adjuring the everything’s clemency

            in the throb inhaled

with our every inhale/ exhaled – as ravening wolf

 

            to cautious shepherd –

 

& though our pride’s brought low in this most enchanted

of countries – in howling wildernesses spectral creatures

make the most of lifting & carrying off women

& men & children & gales – bewitched & distracted bristling

& snarling                   our houses flattened

 

///

 

& as for this three hundred & forty-mile length of river

 – & nearer me the Slate & the Hardware & Bear Creek – some three

            thousand years before Europeanization

nomads hunted game & migrating birds along contiguous

 

            streams                        indeed this James

– which name in Monacan is lost to us – has seen human life

            for at least fifteen thousand years – long before

the Dutch & Spanish & English & the hawking

 

of all that shit to tourists at Monticello – moving season-to-

 

season following animal decampments

& spawning fishes & plants’ sproutings & flowerings

            I’ve lived on this ridge

just thirty-five years – a miniscule fraction of its eons – still

 

colossal oaks delimit sheer precipices/ nine

in all rising forever as with bows & arrows rankless wraiths

stalk game & farm & make pottery – always on the lookout –

 

but winter’s come

again & it’s very cold now/ fires in the hearths & everything

is in question

 

 – do you believe in the possibility of a biblical

Eden?              before bellum omnium contra omnes

before a war of all against all – living below the fall line

or westerly to my Piedmont    mine & yes this is personal

 

– once I hand dug a thirty-yard trench/ a land sculpture stretching

the riverbank’s length/ illuminated at dusk in blinking

Morse Code               I’m here          where are you –

 

& what do you suppose we were like in a so-called original

state of nature when the river was food & travel & all fertility

when the river             was life itself

 

Every night the owl with his wild monkey-face calls through the black

branches, and the mice freeze and the rabbits shiver in the snowy fields

– Mary Oliver

 

1. & still we lullaby trip-wired in the owl’s crepuscular

shriek/ our bones raw vole scraps in the rafters – consummate

Tyto alba’s vomit on the barn struts – from edgelands

 

of Athene noctua/ stripped from colors of sapphires/ flagged

in magic & mysteries & potentialities of the living & unliving

            pretty things/ a golden canary perched

            between thumb & forefinger

 

* we sauntered straight out of Africa *

* whose owls augur shamans & witchcraft & wizardry *

 

///

 

& yet this morning I heard on the radio the difference between

1.5 & 1.75 in average rising temperatures means

extinction & death & not only for us but for them

 

& yet               it’s already here & the despairing

 

begins

 

Kiribati Maldives Fiji & Palau           Micronesia Cabo Verde

Solomons &Tangier   Sarichef Seychelles Torres Straight

& Cartaret Tuvalu & Marshalls all disappear

 

///

 

I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in.

Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?

– Aldo Leopold

 

1. & yet as adit in its grievous cut lends

                        drain               level                 linearize

let us patch & slip & blamelessly begin

 

again – emptied as neonate or scarcely – as pentimento

tracing Virga’s barely shower-stippled earth             as dearth

reconsidered as weald unattended coyotes camp

beneath the crowning feast

 

limber up         haunch & sup

 

& as the watering pot impersonates the heavens in night sky’s

brindling – tumbling galactic – poured stitch

by stitch in clannish quilters’ patterns: Swallow’s Flight                

 

Ocean Waves              Touching Stars            as guardian angels

living in the beams of this old house

tympanum                   spandrel                      arch

 

in line-dried bliss or flat or round or hot-hammered strands

or polished slick as watered silk turned volte-

face to coal ash & bone or pleached & pruned as vagary to whim

 

* relict cherries in a bubble-glass flask *

* paired monogrammed silver spoons *

* foxed parchment daybooks & ledgers *

 

in lessons from deep down a Tidewater well heap

            for wildness on impulse

for catamount/ puma/ panther             predator to prey

            absence to restoration/ resurrection inchoate

 

 – as ghost tracks’ glint/ a shade crossing

an entirely unblemished snowfall –

 

as prophesy/ as recitation tutor

to disciple from heart-face ghost owl/ night owl                   

Abrahamic mystic decider of the fate of every rat & mouse

& gopher & pearly virgin nested in the sluice            the tarn

 

from my larynx/ resort & consort       from wanton

in declivity/ verge in hiatus as only unbound

 

can ever be – new lifted – from cavities borne

& resonant in concentric wreathes

of wondrous noetic harmonies