First Day of Snow

More Beauty & Terror

It snowed last Thursday, December 7, and that was the first snow of the year. I woke up, looked out the bedroom window, saw a white void. The entire canyon where I live was enshrouded inside a snow cloud. It was so thick I couldn't see the apple trees lining the coyote fence that are only about ten paces from the window. 

At first, the snow flying around was small, tiny particles, but then became large flakes, flakes stuck to flakes, and the ground was eventually covered. Around noon, the cloud began to thin and clear.

By December, it usually has snowed here in Santa Fe at least twice - more up in the foothills and mountains. Because it hasn't snowed at all this fall, the snow brought up that dread and anxiety I feel when thinking or reading about Climate Change (the summers here are starting to become viciously hot; and most winters are now mild...and Santa Fe is at 7000 feet!).  

Ah, yes, Climate Change: 

the great horror in the mind that we've so desperately tried to make invisible, to erase from every day view. The US is probably the only place left on earth where news outlets still allow crank scientists - paid by oil companies - to talk and babble and keep refluxing their tired ideas that have no basis in fact. 

I have always thought that the desperate urge to believe these cranks is because the horror of Climate Change (the destruction of something so essential and unprecedented as the cycles of nature) is too vast for many to absorb. It's easier to look away, call it all a hoax - like those who keep claiming that all the gun massacres are hoaxes, desperate to cling to their vision of how the world should be - not how it is.

(Believe me, I know how hard it is to see the world as it actually is, but the only way to peace - internal, external - is to see what is right there in front of you...however painful...).

And so thoughts of Climate Change got me to ruminating about those things in this culture that are right out there in plain sight and yet remain invisible, something we see at the corner of the eye, and continually dismiss. 

There are so many of these things that I can't go into the list here...except one:

The wars, so many wars, that the US military is engaged in around the world...

...the war in Afghanistan (in its sixteenth year),the war in Iraq (in its fourteenth year), Libya, Somalia, the skirmishes and black ops all over Africa (as the recent deaths of soldiers in Niger have made clear), in the Philippines...

and the drone strikes in Yemen...in Pakistan...the list of countries where we have drones hovering over the populations is now huge...

The carnage and bodies (civilians, children) has increased exponentially in the last ten years.

And so the snow fell through the morning, until about noon. It was beautiful. I have always been entranced by snow. Even when I have to shovel it. Even when it makes the roads treacherous. It calms me. It buries the noise of the world for a little while. It buries the noise in my head for a little while. It illuminates the tracks of animals that normally slink and pad through the night undetected.

In the face of such beauty, the fear, sorrow, and anger continued. Once again, beauty and terror. The beauty and terror moved through me throughout the weekend. The snow has melted, but the thoughts continued. Last night I wrote this (still a work in progress):

First Snow of the Year

1.

The topmost pear branch is a deer femur.

Magpie claw-prints are visible for a few seconds,

then fold into stone.

A perfect sphere of snow gathers on top

of the last standing post of a fallen fence.

Old borders, buried.

2.

Things that were invisible before - fallen

branches and dead stalks, a gopher's hole - 

become visible as snow settles.

A hollow sunflower stalk, head bent down,

bearing the weight of the entire snow cloud,

scans the trees ahead, then begins to move -

stiff, limping - carrying his dead daughter's

possessions on his back. It is all he has. All
that lies between himself and death.

3.

The wars go on and on. Many years ago, they

became invisible, faded into the background.

No war news anymore. When did that happen?

We go to work, come home, eat dinner, talk, 
remark how the moon makes the shadows of things -

     trees, stones, parked cars, houses, walls -

                more real than the things themselves...

4.

Bright moon, clear sky: bone-light on blue snow.

Beyond the bedroom window, something moves.

                        I turn slowly, want it to be a face,

a stranger's face, asking for something,

                                                                a sacrifice -

                        a finger bone, an eye, the part

                 of me that lives inside a cholla thorn

                        lit orange by the setting sun -

but there is nothing there. There is never anything there.

Organizations:

World Beyond War

Voices for Creative Nonviolence

Stop Drone Warfare - American Friends Service Committee  

United for Peace & Justice: Stop Endless War

Ban Weaponized Drones petition 

Airwars.org  

Articles:

Drone Whistleblowers out of the Shadows

A Wider World of War - Elite Commandos Deployed to 149 

Countries in 2017

The Atlantic: Lets Make the Anti-War Movement Great Again 

US state of war - July 2017

"Every country destroyed or destabilized by U.S. military action is now a breeding ground for terrorism." 

Interview and Featured Poems in The Bitter Oleander

The latest issue of

The Bitter Oleander

(Autumn 2017)

features an extensive interview,

along with twenty pages

of poems from 
three unpublished manuscripts.

There is an excerpt of the interview and a sample poem on The Bitter Oleander website (current feature page) that you can find here.

Many thanks to
Paul B. Roth, 

editor of The Bitter Oleander Press,

(the press that published 

All the Beautiful Dead)

for doing the interview

and publishing such a large cross-section 

of current poems.

I have posted the beginning of the interview 

below: 

PBR: Thank you so much for allowing us to speak with you about your work. For those of our readers who may not know much about you, would you tell us about your early years and those influences that brought you to where you are today as a

writer?

CG: My father was in the Navy, so I moved around a lot as a child. Both the swamps and woods of northern Florida (near Jacksonville) and the canals and fields and towns of southern Belgium (near Mons) had an immense impact on my writing. I now think of it as American wilderness and European civilization mingling in my mind and body. These two things can easily be mistaken as opposites — but I think they inform each other. Or, they inform each other inside me.

Death is pervasive in the wilderness. And this death is inextricably linked to life. They can't be separated. There are few words that can contain the wild. But what I can say about it is that I perceive it as beautiful. And, at the same time, I experience a terror within that beauty. Like life and death in a swamp, beauty and terror cannot be separated from each other. 

Because home was a rather tense place, sometimes frightening, I spent quite a bit of time wandering around and fishing in swamps alongside moccasins and alligators and the occasional wild dog pack (run!) and all manner of strange insects (so many that I imagine some of them had probably never even been named), and that beauty/terror feeling has stayed with me and is probably the main source of my work.

Being in the natural world, mostly alone, I would spontaneously perform rituals for no reason at all. Here's one: after I gutted a catfish, I'd cut the head off and place it in the crotch of a live oak*. The next day, when I returned, it would be gone (gone, gone, always gone). I think there was a sense that something mysterious — a spirit, a god, something I couldn't name or fathom — was taking my offering at night. At the same time, I knew it was probably a raccoon. But I held both of those things in my mind together — they didn't cancel each other out. The catfish head is part of some mysterious interaction with the invisible world and the catfish head is also food for a raccoon…

*********

To read the entire interview 
and poems,

you'll need to buy the issue

($10.00, shipping free).

You can buy it at the BOP website

here.

The issue also includes poetry by 
Stephanie Dickinson, Anthony Seidman, Anirban Acharya, Steve Barfield, Laurie Blauner, Lara Gularte...

Fiction by 
Jeanine Alberto, Ye Chun, Mitch Zigler...

And translations of work by 
Alberto Blanco (Mexico), Astrid Cabral (Brazil), Andres Ehin (Estonia), Siomara Espana (Ecuador), Ute von Funcke (Germany)...

among many others.

* I'd like to add here that I'm a vegan and the only thing I gut now is the occasional squash or pumpkin. 
If you want to know more about the consequences of eating meat, 
see Michaela's blog on the subject (it's short and sweet), 
called: Dead Zones 
(avec recipe for mashed potato enchilada casserole). 

And this:
Animal Feed Crop Feed Needs Destroying Planet (Guardian Article, October 5, 2017)

Earthrise

************


And this, from "Our Revolution":

"Right now, fifty Registered Nurse volunteers from National Nurses United's disaster relief program, the Registered Nurse Response Network (RNRN), are on the ground in Puerto Rico delivering critical health care services to people who are in desperate need of help.

"The situation is dire. Hospitals are overwhelmed and local clinics and doctors' offices are still closed due to lack of electricity. The collapsed infrastructure is keeping patients with storm-related injuries and long-term health needs from receiving care. Without food, clean water, adequate shelter, medicine, or electricity, we may be facing a humanitarian calamity.

"We need your help to provide the care that 3.5 million of our fellow citizens so desperately need. Please chip in $5 to RNRN's disaster relief fund, in order to support the mission to Puerto Rico and other deployments in the future. Your contribution could mean the difference in getting people on the ground the resources they need to make it through this crisis."

Tidal Flats: long poem in Mudlark

Tidal Flats

Bryn Mill Pipe, Swansea Bay

a long poem 

(25 sections)

has been published by 

Mudlark

as Issue 63. 

Here's the introduction to the poem:

Beauty & Terror

"The original notes for Tidal Flats were written in Swansea, Wales between October 2009 and December 2011, while my wife was a student at Swansea University. Although I was lucky enough to have a UK work visa, I could not find any consistent work for the entire two and a half years I lived there. Because of this, I spent the better part of my time roaming the strand along Swansea Bay, across the mud flats at low tide (the bay has the second largest tidal range in the world - a difference of 7 to 9 meters between high and low tide), the neighborhoods around the bay, and Gower - a peninsula near Swansea that juts westward into the Bristol Channel. 

           

Swansea Bay, looking east, at Swansea Docks

"Being so close to so much water, after years in the dry American West, was disconcerting, but also brought up ancient thoughts of the ocean as the original womb. My first month walking those mud flats, I envisioned one of the first fish (still available within my genes) looking out through my eyes. So, the poem began with the idea of human ancestry reaching back to the first fish, how we have been shaped by surrounding living systems, the history of life on earth alive within us all, and the question of how to access that beauty.

           

Whiteford Lighthouse, North Gower

"The Copenhagen Climate Change Conference was taking place at the same time I connected with that first fish (late 2009), and I felt a deep sense of dread when the US government could not face the realities of climate change and refused to act in a useful and coherent way (visions of millions of climate refugees fleeing resource wars/rising sea levels, mass extinction…). We were crossing the point of no return. The cycles, as humans have always known them, were going to change. From this came the terrifying question: how does the human mind absorb and deal with something as vast and unprecedented as the consequences of climate change? And from that question came others: what does 'praise' mean in relation to nature now? And this: what do we mean when we say 'the end?'"

Find the entire poem here.

Snowman w/seaweed hair
on strand in front of Guildhall, Swansea

Many thanks to William Slaughter,

Editor of Mudlark,

for publishing the entire poem!

Thanks also to 
Poetry Wales

and 
New Welsh Review

for publishing sections of this poem.

A book that had a large influence on this poem:

The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World

by

David Abram

Read it. 

Now.

Strand at Rhossili, Gower