An updated version of the
long poem,
Solutions for the End of
the World,
has been published by
It can be found here.
It’s a long and strange one
and I thank Robert Nazarene
(Editor of the Journal)
for publishing it.
Not many journals take a
chance on long poems these days.
The poem is the sequel to
my long eco-catastrophe-ceremony poem, Tidal Flats.
Which can be found here.
Solutions for the End of
the World
stars the first alchemist,
Maria Prophetissa,
the painter Goya, and a giant feathered eel
that could possibly be a symbol for the balanced
cycle
of nature as well as the destructive catastrophe
that is climate change.
The poem is basically how
I was processing my own grief, anger, numbness and bewilderment over the seemingly
unsolvable problem (or as I say in the poem: insoluble) of climate change.
I say unsolvable because
the world may be able to stop some climate-oriented catastrophes at this point, but there are many catastrophes
that will happen because we’ve delayed doing anything for far too long.
 |
| Generation Z, trying to save everyone else's ass... |
For many
things, we’ve passed the point of no return
(catastrophes such as lost coastlines, mass migrations, mass extinction, extensive drought, continuous and vast forest fires, food shortages,
ocean dead zones, etc. are happening now).
What’s interesting is that
during the time I was writing the poem (July 2019 – September 2019) something
happened that overwhelmed my entire nervous system and now I have almost no memory of writing the sixth section of the poem.
And yet I think the sixth
section is the best. It’s probably the key to the whole poem and writing it probably helped in the healing process.
It’s the part where
the feathered eel takes the narrator on a journey across the globe, pointing
out ancestors and descendants.
 |
| White Rhino |
And so…
you can find the entire
poem here.
 |
| Vaquita |
I’ve posted a few out-of-sequence
segments
from section 6 below:
And
the Eel whispers into my ear:
“There
is a short-horned lizard, sharp-scaled, with inter-
connected
shades of brown around a sleepy eye that opens
wide
to take me in, to survey canyons below the White Rim,
absorb
the Green River, while it clings to sandstone, red as
human
blood dried for centuries in the sun…and the rise and
fall
of its ribcage is the breath of the stone beside it, is the
breath
of the tides in Baja, further south. This is your
descendent…This
is your ancestor…”
And
the Eel whispers into my ear:
“There
is a white rhinoceros lying on its side, Ol Pejeta, Kenya,
last
breath released, and there is a man who crouches next
to
the rhino, witness to the last breath, heart-broken, his hand
on
the ground, feeling what is there, feeling what is no longer
there.
Sorrow moves in a slow circle around him, and the ghost
of
his loneliness slips into the heart of a woman waiting for a bus
on
Boulevard de Strasbourg, Toulouse, the morning of her first
day
of work in five years. She stretches out on the pavement,
theater
for passing cars, and the earth beneath opens, grateful,
takes
her heart into its mouth. This is your descendent…This
is
your ancestor…”
And
the Eel whispers into my ear:
“There
are precise mountain shadows on the moon, cat paws
across
dust, imprints of what’s been lost, what can’t be returned;
a
child left behind in an abandoned train station, unable to move,
stuck
there for fifty years wondering why, why won’t they come
back
for me? And the wondering is the wind that moves through
the
grass grown through the cracks in concrete. This is your
descendent…This
is your ancestor…”
And
the Eel whispers into my ear:
“There
is a sound, the sound of the sun, how it mimics a chorus
of
white-and-black striped bees, of wings that no one can see
for
speed; of wind that flows liquid from a squadron of flying
squid,
searching for the source of the sun. And there is a woman
in
a basket boat, looking down into the sun on water, off the coast
near
Lagi Village, Bin Thuan Province, who can hear the spin at
the
center of the sun’s reflection, how it desires to hide in skin,
in
pine needles, how it speaks through the antennae of long-horned
beetles
hiding in the dark. This is your descendent…This is your
ancestor…”
And
the Eel whispers into my ear:
“There
is a corpse-burner, breaking a skull with a bamboo stick,
scarf
wrapped around his face against pyre flames, Manikarnika
Ghat,
Varanasi. No one will touch him, this death-tender, smoke-faced,
and
so he has rejected touch. He knows the terrible poem the tourists
refuse
to hear; grease, blood, smell of shit. And there is an Angler Fish,
ball
organ dangling near its mouth, alight, drawing in the curious, all
the
dreams that have sifted down to the bottom, transmitting the death
poem.
And there is a bank teller in Santiago, Chile, who wakes to the
crack
of the skull, smell of burning flesh. She touches her cheek, feels
the
bone beneath, feels the trilobite fossil embedded in the bone. This
is
your descendent…This is your ancestor…”
You can find the entire poem here.
**************
Meanwhile, some semi-good news:
3
Dirty Pipelines Delayed: Supreme Court Rejects Trump Effort to Greenlight
Keystone XL Construction (Common Dreams)
No comments:
Post a Comment