Photo credit: Nina Subin
DECIDUOUS
Speak plainly, said November to the maples, say
what you mean now, now
that summer’s lush declensions lie like the lies
they were at your feet. Haven’t
we praised you? Haven’t we summer after summer
put our faith in augmentation.
But look at these leavings of not-enough-light:
it’s time for sterner counsel now.
It’s time, we know you’re good at this, we’ve
seen the way your branched
articulations keep faith with the whole, it’s time
to call us back to order before
we altogether lose our way. Speak
brightly, said the cold months, speak
with a mouth of snow. The scaffolding is
clear now, we thank you, the moon
can measure its course by you. Instruct us,
while the divisions of light
are starkest, before the murmurs of con-
solation resume, instruct us in
the harder course of mindfulness.
Speak truly, said April. Not just
what you think we’re hoping to hear, speak
so we believe you.
The child who learned perspective from the
stand of you, near and nearer,
knowing you were permanent, is counting
the years to extinction now. Teach her
to teach us the disciplines of do-less-harm. We’re
capable of learning. We’ve glimpsed
the bright intelligence that courses through the body
that contains us. De +
cidere, say the maples, has another face.
It also means decide.
SLEEPING BEAR
(Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore,
Leelanau County, Michigan)
1.
The backstory’s always of hardship, isn’t it?
No-other-choices and hoping-for-better
on foreign shores. A minute ago, as measured
by the sand dunes here, the shipping lanes were thick
with them, from Hamburg, Limerick, towns
along the Oslofjord, and lucky to have found
the work. The Michigan woodlands hadn’t been denuded yet
(a minute ago) so one of the routes was
lumber and the other tapped a prairie’s worth
of corn. There’s a sort of cushioned ignorance that comes
of being born-and-then-allowed-to-live-in-
safety so I used to think it must have been more
forgiving here, less brutal than the brutal North Atlantic
with its fathoms and its ice. But no.
The winds, the reefs, the something-to-do-with-
narrower-troughs-between-the-waves and lakes like this
are deadlier than oceans: in
a single year the weather claimed one in every
four. We come for the scale of it: waters without
a limit the eye can apprehend and – could
there be some mistake? – aren’t salt. Dunes
that dwarf pretension which if falsely consoling is right and
good. Where commerce lifts its sleeping head.
If I had the lungs for diving I expect I’d be there
too among the broken ribs and keels. Visitors need
a place to sleep and something to fill up the
evenings, it’s natural, the people in town
need jobs. Calamity-turned-profit in tranquility. My
father’s father’s father was among the ones
who did not drown. Who sold his ship
and bought a farm.
2.
What is it about the likes of us? Who cannot take it in
until the body of a single Syrian three-
year-old lies face down on the water’s edge? Or this
week’s child who, pulled from the rubble, wipes
with the back and then the heel of his small
left hand (this time we have a video too) the blood
congealing near his eye then wipes (this is a problem,
you can see him thinking Where?) the hand
on the chair where the medic has put him.
So many children, so little space in our rubble-strewn
hearts. In alternative newsfeeds I am
cautioned (there is history, there is such a thing
as bias) that to see is not to understand. Which (yes, I know,
the poster child, the ad space, my consent-
to-be-governed by traffic in arms) is true and quite
beside the point. The boy on the beach, foreshortened
in the photograph, looks smaller than
his nearly three years would make him, which
contributes to the poignancy. The waves have combed his
dark hair smooth. The water on the shingle, in-
different to aftermath, shines.
3.
There was once, says the legend, a wind-borne fire or as
some will recount it a famine and
a mother bear with her two cubs was driven
into the lake. They swam for many hours until the
smaller of the cubs began to weaken and,
despite all the mother could do, was drowned,
then the second cub also, so when the mother reached
the shore which then as now betokened
a land of plenty she lay down with her face
to the shimmering span whose other side was quite
beyond her powers of return. The islands
we call Manitou, the one and then the other, are
her cubs, she can see them, we go to them now by ferry.
We are not
the people to whom the legend belongs.
4.
And even on my city block. There has always been suffering,
both little and large. But does it
compare to mine? Yours is nothing.
I saw the woman running. I heard her scream.
You did nothing.
She said please she said help me we all stood still.
You all stood still. It took us a minute to figure it out,
by then they were down
the street. And then? The men were on bikes,
I didn’t think that happened here. That wasn’t
my question. Whatever
they’d taken had made her quite desperate, I’ve
never heard a scream like that. Then you? Then we
went on with our evening.
5.
Stroke of the pen. 16:42 on a Friday. Say you were
already in the air.
You’ve given away your blankets, your
tent, you thought you’d seen the last of camps. Or say
it was your buddy from
the 82nd Airborne: interpreter, ally,
engineer. Targeted twice because of what he did
for you. His papers are no good now,
your promises were lies. Detrimental, says
the president. Malicious intent. Says, only those
who love us. That’s
your favorite part.
6.
If a spirit – call him Manitou – takes pity on a
family of bears or, more
to the point, if humans imagine they share
the earth with bears who are worthy of pity and
a cognizant spirit however
remote with pity to spare, why then
why then a sand dune may be more than sifted
silica. The wind goes on with its
sorting, the lake bed cradles its dead.
But part of the language the glacier used
to speak to the sculpted substrate will
include this bit of sediment.
We didn’t mean to fail you. We were here.
NOT SO MUCH AN END AS AN ENTANGLING
(Tom Uttech, oil on linen, 2016)
1.
And then the animals began to flee
from right
to left across the surface of the visual
plane, the birds in great number, owl
and osprey,
red-necked grebe,
the nuthatch, the nighthawk, the warbler in
eleven
kinds. And that’s when we began to
understand because it wasn’t normal, wasn’t
what you
expect to find, the eaters and the likely-
to-be-eaten in a single frame. Despised
the ground,
our poet says, intelligent of seasons. And
the sixth day too, when creatures of the earth
began to walk
the earth, proposes a thought-scape of
nothing-needs-to-die-that-I-might-live.
But that was
then and in the painting it is more
like now, desiccated needles on a desiccated
branch. If creation-
with-pinions appears to fly below as well as
in the sky, that’s simply a trick of vantage point,
the better
to accommodate the interlocking logic
of the whole, as when
eternity
is broken into pieces we construe as plot.
So timber wolf and white-tailed deer and indigo
bunting below
which is to say between, perspective
having turned the three dimensions into two,
all of them
fleeing, right to left, as from (since they, who
are intelligent of seasons, are the first to know) from
immanent
disaster, which has made the lesser enmities
moot.
2.
When I was a child it was the numbers I couldn’t
get out of
my head, so many billions, so little time
to make it stop. A single patch of ground, say, just
from here
to the wall: how many of us, if we took turns
lying down, could fit? I didn’t think water or waste
or work,
I just thought how many standing and how
many minutes the others would get to rest. Only later
did
the obvious answer occur to me: I won’t
be here, and then the panic would stop. But have
3.
I now seen death he wondered and the angel said,
you’ve scarcely
seen its shadow, look: the winged-ones, furred-
ones fleeing from right to left, as from the
names that you
in all your fond first powers bestowed.
There was water in the reed beds (think of it,
water still), the sun
still rose, the snail-foot exuded
its mucus. And then the angel pulled, just slightly,
on one of the threads
composing the linen
the painter had tacked to his stretcher. What is it
you love
that has not been ruined because of you.
ARCHIVAL
If the curator should wish, for example,
to save for later scrutiny (or
wonder, wonder’s worthy too) a once-
ubiquitous download for
disbursing the forces of Christendom
or evading the enemy’s land mines
or colonizing Mars and if, as is all
but certain, the program depends
on software run by hardware no longer
extant, if reconstructions work too
well, eliding the awkward temporal gap
between keystroke and pixelated
body count, how will they know
what it’s like to be us? If even
the ditches along our abandoned railroad
spurs have long succumbed to
never-any-water, how will they know
what we mean by July?
(when the cornflowers first appear) (when
gladly the parched eye quenches
its thirst in blue) For providence, in lieu
of the kind we used to think
we trusted in, we’ve built a Global
Seed Vault on an island in the
Arctic Sea. There are rules. The seeds
aren’t “owned” but “stored”
and only the donors of origin have access.
(That will tell them something too)
So maize and eggplant, lotus root and
cabbage in potentia for the world
to come. Assuming survival of people who
remember what the seeds are for
and something that passes for topsoil.
Permafrost, five hundred meters at
present, and sleeping tectonics below. Site
well above what’s likely to be a
flood zone when the ice caps melt. It must
have helped with costs a bit to build
the vault where once we mined for coal.
They’ll credit us with irony.
IF THE CURE FOR AIDS,
said someone in that earlier pandemic, were
a glass of clean water, we couldn’t save half the people here.
If half
the workers at Tyson Meats come down with the virus we still
have a plan for protecting the owners from lawsuits.
If the phone in the farmhouse
rings when it’s long past dark and the milk . . .
If the tanks at the co-op are full . . .
If milk dumped into the culvert makes you think of death.
My neighbor drove to Lansing in his pickup, I expect
you’ve seen the photos too. The statehouse floor. The rifles. He
had just culled half his herd. And while
we’re casting about for ways to summon normal, I’ve been
watching footage of the day-old chicks.
The hundred and sixteen
thousand buried alive, it seems we can’t afford the feed.
Or can’t afford the falling price of
chicken. I’m mostly confused
by the articles meant to explain.
Look at the spill of them, dump truck into the pre-
dug ditch, the mewling yellow spill of them, still
in the down we find adorable. Red earth.
Impassive skyscape. Skittering
bits of agitation on the body of the whole.
EPITHALAMION
(For Susan and George)
The beautiful geometry the trees become
each winter here
is beginning to blur at the edges and
the robin we think
must be a little deranged has for the third time
in as many years
returned from wherever she goes for sun and
resumed
her attacks on the window. She’s at it every
day, feet first,
as though to scatter an enemy host or
seize contested
foothold. And supposing she’s been deceived
by the visual
field, we’ve tried removing the blinds,
the screen,
and once in desperation taped a page of the New
York Times
to the glass. No luck. She is relentless as
the warming earth.
Sweet lake, abide our lingering here.
The four-
footed creature who year after year leaves
a wreckage
of yolk-smeared shell beneath the ragged
larch where
year after year our robin restores her nest
must come
by night. Sweet lake. He too has his work
in the world, or so
I’ve tried to think. The window refuses to
moralize.
But wedding songs require a point of view
and we,
when grief has had its way with us, are
all the more
stubborn in matters of joy. The joy
that has been
untouched by grief is precious and
protectionless.
This chosen joy – Sweet lake, abide – is
rarer still. And shared.
SOSTENUTO
Night. Or what
they have of it at altitude
like this, and filtered
air, what was
in my lungs just an hour ago is now
in yours,
there’s only so much air to go
around. They’re making
more people, my father would say,
but nobody’s making more land.
When my daughters
were little and played in their bath,
they invented a game whose logic
largely escaped me –
something to do with the
disposition
of bubbles and plastic ducks – until
I asked them what they called it. They
were two and four. The game
was Oil Spill.
Keeping the ducks alive, I think,
was what you were supposed to
contrive, as long
as you could make it last. Up here
in borrowed air,
in borrowed bits of heat, in costly
cubic feet of steerage we’re
a long
held note, as when the choir would seem
to be more
than human breath could manage. In
the third age, says the story, they
divided up the earth. And that was when
the goddess turned away from them.
NWCC give thanks to Linda Gregerson for these poems!
Linda Gregerson is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently of Canopy (Ecco/HarperCollins 2022). She is also the author of The Reformation of the Subject: Spenser, Milton, and the English Protestant Epic; Negative Capability: Contemporary American Poetry; and numerous essays on early modern English and contemporary American poetry. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Gregerson directs the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. She divides her time between Ann Arbor, Michigan, and London.
KLIMAAKSJON / NORWEGIAN WRITERS´ CLIMATE CAMPAIGN // NWCC 