April Diary 28: failing upward, tumbleweed, new beasts

 

failure i love you
i suckle you on my bile
and on my melancholy

i see the above-ground hollow in the roots turned trunk of a black birch – that space where a rotting stump had stood — as a magnificent monument to failure

as i suppose we all are, safe perches for new sprouts, new rivers flowing upstream with sweet sap

but that stump had been an oak where now there are only birches and our failures outnumber the trees

our oceangoing freight outweighs the estimated mass of all living organisms in every ocean

the sickly sweet fumes of our failure have driven out all but the severest of angels in heaven

those with the fire
and the brimstone

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hiking for three hours before i sit down and take out my tea. i can’t have covered more than five miles in all that time, but who cares. it’s been a good ramble in the gloom

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graupel starts falling as i walk the last mile back to the house

thinking a lot about likely ecological futures this afternoon. it occurs to me that one advantage native species have over generalist invaders is in many cases much more genetic variation — essential in a world where drought is followed by a flood year, freak storms become common and last and first frost dates vary wildly. if global trade significantly declines that will give native ecosystems a bit more breathing room, and the invaders will inevitably begin to decline as pests and diseases catch up with them

or so i’d like to think

near the bottom of the hollow today, rolling up the road in the wind i spotted an actual tumbleweed, i think

another invasive species coming in via the railroad. i love trains, but.

further up the hollow in a side ravine i spotted what looked like a recent scent marking on a beech: scratch marks and i’m guessing urine.

bobcat?

and from a little further up, at the end of the last logger in Plummer’s Hollow‘s last skid trail before my parents finally got him stopped (as detailed in Mom’s book Appalachian Autumn) here are the only two sycamore trees in the hollow, growing about 50 feet apart, both sprouted right after the logging so around 1990

seeing that second one as a single individual and not conjoined twins so to speak

anyway that’s where my head was today and also by sheer coincidence my feet

i liked this stanza today from Zang Di:

Language lives secretly. It lives out life’s
other flavors. Language waits for you to appear
and permits other lives under the sun.

Zang Di, “Secret Linguistics Series” (tr. Eleanor Goodman)

he’s got a point. without storytelling, without narratives, without song and poetry, we’d be forsaken in a way we can hardly imagine. our lives would shrink to the present moment in all its terrifying immediacy. but we take language so for granted, like fish take the sea for granted. who knows what other fantastic beasts this language of ours may yet harbor

that’s why i write poems: to discover new beasts

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