I was immediately struck by the title of Dan Eltringham’s poem (“[Hard to know where to feel now]”). “Where” comes up frequently in these poems and in titles such as “Where Our” (Davidson) and “WHERE ONE IS AND WHERE ONE IS GOING …” (Tichy). So, unsurprisingly, does feeling. Poetry (lyric) is of course traditionally all about feeling but too often, historically, our lack of sense of where we are and how we engage with where we are has led to an over-emphasis on ourselves and the earth as ours, on our minds and souls over our mammalian bodies. Even apocalyptic poetry (of which there is a rather tedious amount) is generally focused on apocalypse for us. Eltringham’s line opens up feeling to “where” as preeminent: where in the world, where in the corresponding body through which we sense the world, is that feeling. It brought to my mind Charles Olson’s statement in “HUMAN UNIVERSE” that “The act of trying to say is always an act of location”, a phrase from which Matthew Cooperman has drawn out an argument for (reading) locationary poetry.

I have been drawn to locationary poetry here and one of the interesting things about selecting for this issue, and indeed reading it now as a whole, is the diversity of those locations both in terms of the connections we can draw between what is happening in different parts of the world and in terms of the specificities that poets embody in form and reference when they attempt to make place, landscape and environment an active agent in the work. The specificities are often acknowledged in titles, epigraphs and references as well as the poems themselves, in times and places as diverse in location and variety as “Hackney Wick, May 2012” [London], “The Huon Highway” [Southern Tasmania, Australia] and “Steinhart Aquarium, San Francisco”. We range from grasslands to marshes, stations to forest, cities to fields, islands to beaches. Such bioregional ways of thinking cut across our political boundaries and remind us of the perils (alongside pleasures) of thinking with maps. Living and working in the world of landscape/eco poetry and poetics, I find water to be particularly prevalent in many poets’ and artists’ work as it has been in my own collaborative projects with Judith Tucker over the last few years (see cover of this issue). I found rich explorations of water in Veronica Fibisian’s “Concertino in C flat Major”, a poem which provides a more subtle engagement with our relation with maps as well as the inter-relationship of human and sea cultures, in Tichy’s “Suibhine on Eigg” (discussed below), and in Susan Richardson’s suggestive estuarine poem, “glass”, with its play on perception and sense of the “managed tide”.

Throughout the process, I have selected poems, often in the Modernist tradition, which push the language in the conviction that this is what makes us work hardest to question and, at times, laugh at our values inherent in the language. Both feed into change. Amy Evans derives her wordplay in part at least from the hermetic and etymological linguistic investigations of another modernist poet, H.D., as the mention of the “sea rose” suggests – sea/water/flood puns run through her “SOUND((ING))S” sequence, part of which is extracted here. They have the effect of being both witty and edgy: edgy in their exploration of the liminal border of land/sea and edgy in conveying a sense of threat both to and from the sea.

From water to wood to stone then, and between these materialities also, these poems play with our perceptions of the material world and often, in New Materialist bent, challenge and erode separations. Giles Goodland opens his “On Stone” with a playful misquote of Heraclitus: “You can step on the same stone twice” and proceeds to play further with an exploration of our consciousness of stone and stone’s consciousness of us but, above all, with our language’s easy appropriative and accustomed usages of the elements around us for human purposes. His Steinian questions without questions marks (“Is air of detachment. Is body of water.”) transform a given into an inquisition and lay the emphasis on the previously discrete nouns and their meanings. Ann Fisher-Wirth’s “[We’re mostly headed for hell]” references the economics, textures and uses of wood while Peter Larkin, longstanding poet-philosopher of trees, demands close attention to his delicate tracing of dependencies through forest ecologies in “Emergent Habits”. I find his work not dry, as it might at first appear, but hopeful as well as stimulating, drawing from a very different system of living and perhaps even thought. A sense of “emergency” suddenly grows to include the possibility of “emergence”. The language does it.

Both Goodland and Evans make reference to classical mythologies in their work, as do many of the poets here. They explore what the myths and rituals and stories of our ancestors’ might teach us, but none of these writers attempt to return us innocently to an ancient past as more naïve environmentalists might do. The Gods must speak in and through now as they do in Julie Maclean’s strikingly present tense poem, “Otway Fire Mother”, which explores bioregion as goddess alive with creatures, “eyes everywhere”, and in Helen Moore’s “Mimesis/Nemesis” where Keridwen has metamorphosed into agricultural machinery which has appropriated the name “Krone”. The poem seems almost to pursue the “triple goddess” through the unpromising contemporary field ecology, yet the visitors or initiates still pursue the sacred in plant form or a return perhaps to the maiden.

Ecopoetics recognises that we must revisit the past and draw on all our cultural resources in the quest for changed thinking, as well as giving tribute where tribute is due, rather than dwelling on the twin and dangerous myths of originality and progress. Mario Petruccio’s translation of the fourteenth-century poet, Hafez, is perhaps the most intriguing example of this here. The places and perceptions of the two poets (Hafez and Petruccio) meet in this text and cross time into our own age, bringing thoughts about sustainability and how we define and learn from wild, natural, farmed and the intimately tended lands we call gardens. Frances Presley reconsiders the scientist Ada Lovelace in reference to the geology of her youth; gender politics emerges through the fractured fragments of “Typography of terra infirma”. Susan Tichy acknowledges and cites Nan Shepherd in her meditative walking poem written in a grammatical and poetic two-line stanza which builds a rhythm that refuses closure until the very last line. Tichy’s “Suibhne on Eigg” revisits a very different history, that of the Seventh Century poet-king, Suibhne, but I must admit that I was drawn as much as anything by the beautifully constructed and condensed sound patterning of these slight island prose poems: “A haven under thorn. A northward hum.”

We extend back in time. We also extend out beyond the self in terms of our bodily senses, engaging with places with our whole bodies and beyond our own bodies, again as New Materialism advocates. Crucially, and with particular urgency (in the face of species extinction and mistreatment), writers are exploring the world of the “non-human” in new ways, following a line of thought that questions the very binary of human/non-human and the absurdity (“une bêtise”) of the category of “animal”.  John Berger, Jacques Derrida and Carey Wolfe are often credited with this philosophical development but it is of course closely linked to the critique of Western binary thinking carried out so powerfully in the work of Donna Haraway and Val Plumwood, one of the greatest Australian environmental thinkers whose legacy is celebrated in the name of this journal.

I have selected poems here which interrogate the diverse categories and roles humans assign to “animals” from spectacles in zoos and aquaria (Meredith Wattison’s funny and fascinating exploration of relationalities in such a context and Lucas Smith’s more hard-hitting “The Lungfish’s Refusal”) to beehives (Caitlin Stobie’s “Hum”, a deceptively short and sweet piece shifting between human and bee experience of honeymaking) to domestic animals (Mark Young’s “a complex number” which, in witty, throwaway vernacular, extends our idea that a pet constitutes a single species). There is considerable controversy within Animal Studies over anthropomorphism yet in poetry we find radical imaginings of bodies, languages and feelings that make us wonder whether there isn’t a place for this. These can only be attempts at empathetic imaginaries but, acknowledged as such, I see them as valuable especially when they apply to the creatures humans have less ability to empathise with, such as Susan Richardson’s sonically rich poem exploring the eye/I of the halibut. Stuart Cooke’s “Song of the Wandering Cat” explores what this so-called “domestic animal” might be doing when it is not with us in a playful page-leaping embodiment of cat-life in the present moment “NOW”.

Cooke’s poem is also a demonstration of more “traditional” and “experimental” techniques coming together successfully – in this case, open form and metaphor. As I would expect in this field, creative use of space on the page is evident in much of this poetry, and works in multiple ways – Fibisan for instance works within justified text margins to create a sense of the flow and tide of the sea in the spaces between words as well as the words themselves. Some of the most adept and striking examples of classic open form are in the poems of Frances Presley, Andrew Jeffrey and Natalie Joelle. Like Cooke, these poets use the form to embody the body’s movement through space (walking, being transported by boat or train), thus making a sense of place through movement and pause. The manipulation of the line on the page also evokes locationary specificities in very particular ways for and of themselves. In “land  ÷ slip I and II” Presley creates a wonderfully particular stanza to evoke and embody the geology of slip, each phrase acting alone and in conjunction with its companions creating many patterns of sound and repetition, slips of eye and tongue. Jeffrey’s “Out to Inner Farne” evokes a sailing rather than walking process, and returning us to water, as spatial and sonic forms shift delicately through the pages. Humour runs through this poem, culminating in the fact that the boat never lands – the slightly bewildered and distracted humans (trying to retain electronic contact throughout) do not achieve their aim, but do move through a realm of birds, fish and islands. Joelle’s pages are seething with energy, their projective lines making direct reference to the politics of the field, keeping text to a minimum and language malleable and alive. All these poets incorporate found materials and histories into their work, feeding into our understanding of how we have seen and intervened with land, in Joelle’s case the development of a herbicide whose name evokes a long agricultural history including the relations of the poor to farming (labour, enclosure, gleaning). Setting Joelle beside Moore makes for interesting connections in these contemporary Georgics.

A different kind of fragmentation is in evidence in Jake Goetz’s “Sutherland Station (notes for poems)”, another process-led piece in which jokey, yet disturbing, “facts” and memories interplay and, as in the fine old avant-garde tradition, we the readers must make the connections, read between as well as through the lines. Yet further experimentation with technique (derived perhaps from Concrete poetry and/or Oulipo constraint) is found in Dave Drayton’s poems which subvert accustomed reading methodologies at first glance. Drayton generates cryptic lines on “MAN” and “LAW”, whose playfulness mocks the pompous titles his poems bear; he destabilises our notions of worth in relation to masculinity and political categories of place in part through the cutting off and querying of familiar adages in relation to these areas. Constraints, used also by Tichy in “Suibhne on Eigg”, remain an important element of writing that wishes to remain aware of its writerliness which also has the effect of pulling the poet back from easy indulgence of rhetoric and lack of interrogation of the ecology of our language and its value systems.

I want to return to where we started with the very human question about “where to feel now”, and a final discussion of pronouns and places. Who, after all, is doing the feeling? I have noticed in recent work how the “I” diminished, often in favour of the “we” as we continue the journey (began again by the modernists) to draw us away from the lyric “I” to more materially entangled perceptions. We see it here in Stobie, Richardson, and Fisher Wirth’s provocative title, “[We’re mostly headed for hell]”. Where we do find an “I”, as in Eltringham, it is an enmeshed “I” (“baked in Britain”, “raw meat on my hands”), full of conflicted feelings of anger and love. Evans too is angry in England, even as she is frolicsome in her little “Counter Café” poem ending, “Oppose It your eyes”. Nothing so simple as polemical, these poets, but definitely political. Another diversion from the poet’s “I” and experience is to explore how we might inhabit another’s place and language. Ann Fisher-Wirth’s poems, shown here alongside Maude Schuyler Clay’s photographs, do far more than documentary or preachifying to open up the experience of Mississippi people living in an environmentally degraded and threatened bioregion. These voices speak in such a believable vernacular that we can hardly believe they are “fictive”, as Fisher-Wirth informs us. These carefully crafted and sounded out voices, their fragmentary stories, are reminiscent of Lorine Niedecker’s New Goose poems exploring the flooding shore of Lake Wisconsin in the 1930s, another important Modernist predecessor for the ecopoetic writings presented here.

“You” can be more powerful too in its conveyance of relationality especially when it shifts uncertainly in reference in a poem such as “Reprise” or in Presley’s land-slip work. The poet, Toby Davidson, is a master of such dizzying  and defamiliarising slides of tempo as we see in “Where Our” – here we shift back in time through a long temporal simile beginning at the end of stanza one and running right through the poem to its bathetic/profound conclusion. Davidson, like several of the Australian poets here, touches on the politics of land rights. As in Mike Ladd’s poem, “The Huon Highway” there is a strong sense here of a multicultural layering of histories captured in land and the names for land, in which some names are lost and buried. Another “where”: “where are their names?” Louise Crisp’s “Buckley’s Lake (Monaro)” is a powerful fragment of a much longer exploration of The Monaro Lakes which extends this concern. The politics of naming, classification and knowledge is relevant to plants also. I loved Crisp’s closely researched “MIWANY (Yam)” in which the sheer profusion of flora, in particular, edible flora, masses into a prose-poem block, an almost physical (richly material and sonic) protest against the dismissal of the tablelands of the Monaro. The human is not omitted but it is minimalised, brought down to size in the little embedded reference to walking into the reserve in spring. Heading over to America, in Katelyn Kenderish’s “Rondeau in January” presence of plantlife in a supposedly largely dormant season asserts itself with no human reference at all in a revivification of a Medieval/Renaissance poetic form.

In this issue of Plumwood Mountain we find just such a rich diversity and I’d like to thank the contributors for the immense pleasure and provocation they bring here and to offer the readers the following lines from Evans’ “SOUND((ING))S” to end my introduction and begin their reading:

Please Listen

to the fol.lowing

pLease listen

To the follo/wing

pplease listEn

To the follow(er)ing

. . .

TO THE

ffff/LOWERING

 

Where Our

 

Bipeds living separate lives emote securely to a circle of screens.

Keypads flash down Loma Street walls in reds and greens, ersatz

shipping lanes. Oxidise space. Hypnotise. Lay waste, like the first

 

sold a shooter’s paradise—kangaroos, bronzewings splashing

from jarrah and wattle of quarried North Cottesloe, that feral,

goannaed ‘Siberia’. Teamsters, gamblers, camel races, picnicked

 

attempts at a ragged Brighton, baby contests for unsecured plots.

Noongar, West Indian, Chinese hawkers with spices, sponges,

contraptions, fisherfolk trading shock at that attack, the look

 

of the kid hauled grey from a dancing bosom meant to cure

everything. Jetty bands, parlour cars, a twelve-foot tiger strung

pointedly—attractions worth queuing for. ‘Costume, Men

 

and Women: Dress of dark material, serge, flannel or flannelette,

extending over the shoulder to the knee. Those in swimsuits

should not loiter.’ This was before the advent of the groyne.

 

 

Reprise

 

Encased museum whispers of the sky world flit the masks

of tinctured-only non-complaint binding sunken sorrow.

Surfacing all golden-eyed, they shield themselves

with infant hands, plug to something in their laps

or spurn announcements, then in French, to sever

open glory lest their waxen slack-jawed memberships

to numinous imposture fail. Sleepers paw at rays

the very disc-clouds bear in numbers. Above (you choose)

the Solomons, lilac streaks hone cometlike to pinkest

cuttlefish quills. You, Half-Planet, hide upon, below,

as a wreathed blue range and a wing: Canadian birds

fly arrowhead Vs, Australians loose barometric sheathes

and so they hang cross-hatched in economy, ruffling wavy

suns which burst clipped dreams and return to you proudly.

These are all from a sequence of poems about Ada Lovelace, the mathematician who worked with Charles Babbage on the Analytic Engine, which led directly to the modern computer.  Part of her life was spent on the Somerset coast near Porlock, an area subject to landslips, which are increasing due to global warming. 

The poems combine elements of Ada’s life and the landscape, visual poetics and geological studies.  The landslip poems use a simple algorithm in which one line of verse is divided or undercut by another.  “Typography of terra infirma” is based on a geological study and plan of the landslipped coast which morphs into the female body.

 

Typography of terra infirma

 

 

 

 

Study of landslipped coastal slopes and woodland, Culbone woods
 
 

land   ÷  slip  I

 


 
 

land  ÷  slip   II

 

 

 

‘In country that is rough, but not difficult, one sees where one is and where one is going at the same time’ (Nan Shepherd)

 

As rock speaks to any

trained or curious eye:

 

someone else

sometime else

 

laid down words—

thin sheets or thick—

 

something broke them

lifted, pressed them

 

here: each rippled sand

each pebble clenched:

 

motion rendered

visible, in red boulders

 

thick with clasts, a wild

conglomerate, something made

 

of other things where

‘pain and suffering shape

 

the mind,’ a quite implausible

‘up above’ where wind hammers

 

worlds together: convenient

and bleak

 

reduced to brash or

lichen crust as brute matter

 

wind/light/space

a mystery thick

 

as contour lines on an old map

—called reticent

 

or maybe clitched, or

‘looking back down

 

the path to the sea’

—I meant seabed

 

a fossil storm just

part way up

 

to paradise—look here:

a shallow dip in rough scree

 

‘where water comes gradually

into focus’ only because

 

it trembles: that is wind

speaking softly

 

felt by those who carry pain

as others carry

 

talismans, a descendental

willingness

 

to walk all day in pursuit

of fear—I mean

 

to corner it, trap it, parse it

thumbing a rock

 

of green/black waves

touching light

 

in the form of leaf

time in a metamorphic

 

stone: ‘and who

with any sense

 

can’t be interested

in that?’—the sheen

 

the shades, the Gates

of Delirium—

 

sandstone, sandwort

iron oxide

 

thought or spasm

touch or word:

 

where a breeze

crosses pain flutters

 

muscle, ligament

sediment, sentiment

 

trees bent flat

by wind and snow

 

skirling waves

of rock uplifting:

 

try to stand there

try to find

 

a there exactly

touching here

 

a timberline

so crystal clear

 

so free of pity

free of dread

 

and all the lakes

that live there still

 

as wind.

 

Avalanche Theory

 

Not cross-section but snow cushion

Not snow cushion but wind slab

Not wind slab but depth hoar

Not depth hoar but deprivation

Not deprivation but detriment

Not detriment but punishment

Not punishment but pillory

Not pillory but armory

Not armory but memory

Not memory but milkweed

Not milkweed but fireweed

Not fireweed but free fall

Not free fall but base fold

Not base fold but firn snow

Not firn snow but snow plume

Not snow plume but speed of sound

Not speed of sound but surge of air

Not surge of air but line of fracture

Not line of fracture but alabaster

Not alabaster but adamant

Not adamant but parchment

Not parchment but palinode

Not palinode but pine warbler

Not pine warbler but wind pebble

Not wind pebble but blunt pencil

Not blunt pencil but burned pillar

 

Snow rarely falls in a state of absolute calm

 

six sections from Suibhne on Eigg: A Dictionary of His Days and Nights

 

This sequence began during my residency at Bothan Suibhne/Sweeney’s Bothy on the Hebridean island of Eigg. A collaboration between Alec Finlay and The Bothy Project, the glass-walled, one-room retreat is the second in a series of artist huts in remote Scottish locations. Finlay has written: I was inspired by the ancient Gaelic legend of Suihbne/Sweeney, the 7th century poet-king who underwent a traumatic crisis in the clash and bring of battle, levitated, leapt, and took to sleeping in a thorn bush. His war-torn exile in the wilderness became a way to interrogate the wild mind, hutting, dwelling, survivalism, protest, and island culture. In some tales, Suibhne found brief refuge on Eigg, the farthest point in his wanderings. In keeping with the limits of island resources, the poems are composed using the Analytic Dictionary procedure (created by the Oulipo’s Noël Arnaud) in which each word must be generated from letters of preceding words arranged in a prescribed and compact graphic.

 

ISLAND

 

An inch of silver light. A narrow danger, illegible intent, or an amorous arc in low, gray water. Then rock nest, hump-backed, veering high above raw, green edge. Tender yarrow opens at evening. Reach wild rest.

 

SHUIBHNE

 

A salt hut under island’s black headland. A nervous eagle, unafraid of northward-slanting light. An empty eye, an anger, a lift: tensing. In doubt, he listens, arcs away as rising gulls turn east.

 

SALT

 

Sea-ash. Light-talk. Eye-sting. If island air is a hard glance, a low hut is home to kelp and thistle.

 

HUT

 

A haven under thorn. A northward hum. To view the danger is to own the edge. As echo, as ebb, so rest and rage will near, return. Narrowly.

 

ARROW

 

Its arc is its reach. Like a raven over open water, the eye reads its exact path. Or, as a compass alters without effort, so an echo touches a cliff. Double or nothing: in the enemy’s hand, a single rock.

 

THORN

 

A test of hope, its opposite is rage. Naked, exiled, his only path is ascent, but angle, like spear point, pierces. Gnawing, kneeling, torn, exhausted, he owns his own ending, scents his own death. Imagined terror: an exact equal.

Three mischievous logs lie on the gravel

in the dreary middle of a showcase

on shocking ways of aquatic survival.

Valisneria waves to the burnt face man

 

and he says, take a breath fuckwits,

I want to see you breathe, he says

And as if to the sound of trumpets

One lazy log rises above the rest

 

to middle water. A kid pounds the glass

then moves on, the albino crocodile’s

next door, eating lamb, the man is steadfast

take a breath dammit, go on.

 

The missing blue-eyed link investigates

each corner and settles ignorantly down

with its antique grinning blue-eyed mates.

Every machine will gradually take on this patina and lose its identity in its function.

– Wind, Sand and Stars, Antoine de Saint-Exupery

 

1

 

a comparison

 

the government’s stance

on asylum seekers

could be best explained

in the way roll-your-own smokers

are smarter than tailored

purely because of the Aussie facts

on Tally-Ho packs, e.g.

 

The hottest Australian day in

history was in Oodnadatta,

South Australia. On the 2^nd of

January 1960. It was 50.7C.

 

2
with anti-natural                                    Enhance your                                                 you

beauty injections            OR                  natural beauty             OR          beauty (!) inject

Enhance                                                    with anti-wrinkle                        with ant       ink

your wrinkle.                                            injections.                                       o (!) (w ink) .

 

3

 

‘how to get lost in                   ’

 

go to                 ’s

central station

and turn left then right

then left usw.

detail the walk

 

4

 

8202     Fury     Fury     SHORTY     RIGS     Ryos     Pacific National …

54 carriages of coal

something about

‘a run-away economy’

 

5

 

I forgot about it from time to time; only when

my teacher came into the classroom and put

the composition books down on the desk without

a word, I was afraid he had found out about it,

and the whole world would find out about it.

As a rule, I was the first he called up when the

composition books were distributed, and I had

to go out in front of the class …

 

6

 

how poetry passes the time –

a Dionysian app – the aim?

one must be absolutely modern

in an ad for tic-tacs:

Do you chew?

 

7

 

move to Spain

get a job and enjoy

tapas y cerveza   after this

lose one’s self to travel

head to Tarifa   look over

the Mediterranean

at the mountains of Morocco

sitting in a summer mist

 

8

 

write something short

and meditative about

the winter morning

i smoked a Marlboro gold in Incheon

staring at the clean

empty streets

 

9

 

… the only one who had made no mistakes.

1 worker hammers, 4 workers watch

( ‘… Coniston, Dapto, Unanderra …’ )

She died the same summer and …

a baby cries, conductor whistles

… I forgot about it, as you forget water

you drank somewhere when you were thirsty.

1.

I’ve run from the valley’s crazy harvest

I’ve run for the ravine’s azure loft

I’m resting on this idle rim

the song breathing hard within me

I am resting

a song is breathing

 

the wind sneaks up

sneaks up on the shoulders of the silence

the wind sneaking up

asking, aaasking – only     the mmm

the merest tip, almost white, slightest asking, “Who?

who?” Then: “WHO?”

“WHO ARE YOU?”

before darting off, a woolly

blanket over sleeping bedrock

 

at rest I’m rolling hills coated in blackest syrup

I’m at the edge of body

I’m at the very edge of ether

I’ve never known who, but wants re-elongate me

to glare presence

I am oozing this sweet honey

 

I am a child of the thumping paw prints

of the rolling canto

the pure phrase

 

eternity’s at my back

the land is brittle

as old rat rachis

my tail is a serpent

it follows me breezily through altitudes

 

 

2.

or the shape is just a log

glinting with moss

and I’m lost in lamp, swiping at tinges

of spider and tic

 

in which case I’m a frail, spluttering orb

an organism shrinking amidst the honeyed-smoke

of fried almonds

 

but I am still singing this song

 

earth is certainty

my body is mercurial

relocation

I’m seeping back to jewel potential

a smile in the night’s pupil

either certainty or who

ever

might approach will fall

into the folds beside each word

shredded by synonym

lashed by saliva strings

my steely gristle-music fight!

 

but the song stops again

I am meat cured beside a mossy log

 

Now:

Miles from any place, translating pressurised thought

into a torrent’s punch, or

sting and spider needle, or

drill and tic guts.

 

I’m at weather’s mercy;

my tail is a blind serpent.

I’m dense frequency heavy,

clumsier than speech.

 

I am still seeking this song.

 

Now:

At rest I am rolling hills coated

in blackest syrup.

 

My paws know better. All sense ends in shred:

signal clumping into claws, into my forest of teeth.

 

At rest I am the rolling hills,

or I am relocating mercurially.

 

Any snap, any rustle is

strike.

 

 Now:

I am land-beat, figure limbed:

my face is a carving in a century of rock;

at flight I shed semantic cloaks.

I am far from here and always;

I am far from here and always, kill: song’s rupture;

potent and nervous, vibe’s shot,

porous as the heaviest gust.

This song I am, still.

The gully is numb today

eyes everywhere

 

as spirit winds

from the red heart

 

blow smoke, flames

and tangled atoms

 

into her dry hair of wild casuarina,

eucalyptus obliqua

 

Her belly soon fills

with rare hooded plover,

 

baby echidna, quolls

In her mouth

 

a caged platypus

swims from side to side

 

banging

against her teeth

 

She spits it out

as charcoal

 

like a lorikeet

spitting seeds

 

while a lyre bird

mimics

 

the cries of frogs—

Growling,

 

Banjo,

Striped Marsh, Spade-foot—

 

too slow too late

to leap or crawl

 

from the boiling pools

of her sacred eyes

In the meadow that slopes

to an aching stream,

 

we’re pilgrims come to reverence

this mythical plant – a chimera

that’s animal & vegetable in form.

 

But the tractor’s already made its bid

for silage,

& from the margins, rattles round robotic –

 

Krone arm bearing down

where grasses quake & fall,

 

this Keridwen come before her time

gnashing teeth,

 

her galvanised desires

mutated beyond the ancient rites

of husbandry.

 

We rush in where angels knelt;

this dwindling haven

from which still ascend

 

on slender spears

Ophrys apifera – sepals colour of white-girl

nipples, where each

 

corolla’s russet fuzz

is scented

eau-de-female Bee;

 

has stubby flightless

wings our quivering

fingers touch.

 

How could such beings evolve

so wily in mimesis,

yet seem so innocent

of their nemesis closing now?

 

These ever-decreasing circles –

Krone a swarm

maddened by the smog

of ancient sunlight –

 

in the meadow that slopes

to an aching stream

Halibut’s Eye

 

sided-lop shift

optical drift

cross-skull nonplussing

 

fresh angle of crab

snatched curve of shrimp

squinter than simple switch

of gaze    astraying

to full eye-dentity change

 

now wowing

at the right-above

the two-times cod

the double sculpin

as I-socket halts

and ossifies

 

then itch of scales on the I-less side

a twitch down the unpatterned lateral line

at the think of what eye might

be missing

 

eye still remember

the upright swim

the lower jaw of the trawl net

that terroring

 

though caudal fin flicks

with its northing frame of mind

the greatest migration begins

with the riddle of assymetry

ends with a sinistral sense

that gravel and sand

are also blind

 

 

glass

 

through you

we can see

mudsuck  moontug

the bore’s gulp

and reach

thrust

of herons’ beaks

scrinch and hulch

of crustaceans

through you

we can see

for ribboned miles

and weeks

far back as

the stipple

of salt

and sargasso

we can see

your epney ebb

magnified

the managed tide

sluice gates pumps

bankside tumps

occupied

by crooked rods

and lines

dark estuarine

netscoop

through you

we can see

no could-have-been

no slip

upstream

no freshwater

fleshing

no riverself slither

from

elver

to

silver

The rose breaks fast, and opens. Unresisting, I bear it into me – dark wine.

In this season, where is a rose-cup without petals, a petal lacking sheen?

 

If your soil is a dust of self-denial, the rosebud heart surely shrivels.

Gardener, irrigate your plot with wine – let every bud swell a little!

 

See, today, the Sufi – who, yesterday, spoke so solidly on the need

for moderation – out wobbling in the fields, enamoured of the wind.

 

These smooth-cheeked blooms won’t last the week: to come and go is

their nature. Nectar-drinker, you must hurry, as a bee does, to your rose.

 

Fellow lover: spring is in departure, and your rosebush yellows, untended.

The Beloved wine, like your garden’s insect music, drains away, unheeded.

 

Our flock, darkly asleep among the trees, awaited dawn: it came like a cup, up

-side-down, reflecting a Face filling with light, Light dripping at a nick in its lip.

 

See: the Master is also the Minstrel, plucking sky’s instrument to impossible rain.

That truer Sun for field and garden sings Love’s banquet, again, onto empty tables.

To Glean

Found text annotations to Millet’s The Gleaners from James Sanders, Self Portrait in Plants, Coconut Books 2015

 

lean & green

 

 

Gleanologics

 

RULES FOR RECORDING EXPERIMENTS

When entries do not completely fill a page the blank remainder of the page must be ruled out

– George Levitt, Notebook (1975-6), Hagley Museum and Library

 

“Gleanologics” gathers the rulings out from DuPont chemist George Levitt’s notebook documenting the synthesis of the first commercial sulfonylurea compounds, which would be trademarked and marketed worldwide as Glean Cereal Herbicide.

Levitt later reflected on his discovery, “When I was a boy in Newburgh, New York, I looked forward to mornings when I would awaken to see the ground covered with a new snowfall. I would rush out to be the first person to leave footprints in the yard outside my window. As a synthesis chemist making new compounds, I could continue to be the first to leave footprints in the snow”.

The composite of Levitt’s marks here suggest a figure leaning in field space as precariously as George Seurat’s late 19^th-century drawing “The Gleaner”.

“GLEAN® XP is a dry-flowable”, reads a recent user manual for the herbicide, “continuous agitation is required to keep GLEAN® XP in suspension”.

These three poems are part of a collaborative book project called Mississippi that involves my poetry and the photography of the Delta photographer Maude Schuyler Clay. It’s important to know that the poems are in a variety of Mississippi voices–all fictive but all based in various environmental difficulties that besiege the state: periodic flooding of the Mississippi River; depleted soil and therefore poor harvests, plus massive deforestation; poverty. Yet the beauty and cultural richness and complexity of the state are also very real.

 

 

 

[We’re mostly headed for hell]

 
Ann Fisher-Wirth

 

We’re mostly headed for hell now the devil’s come among us. No point reading the papers, watching the news, just got to lay up for the family best I’m able. My third wife, Jeanie, she’s got this little girl, bucktooth as a chipmunk, needs some orthodontia. Wood’s rotten on the porch, like to be some job getting that replaced. Squirrels at the wiring in the attic. And I still got to be paying child support to the deep-dyed bitch who run me out, and the other one, Bonnie, good Christian woman, good cook too, but she didn’t take to doin the dirty. Well what do you think?—couldn’t help it none after Jeanie leaned over me, holding my jaw while the doc pulled that molar. Soil’s poor, too much rain, no rain, cotton used to be good, but sparse this year no matter how you spray it—and now I’m up against selling off more timber. Loblolly pine. Grows fast, good money, but even it don’t thicken like it used to. Heart pine? thing of the past. Can’t find that good hard sappy wood no more, it’s all cut down, like my grandma’s house was built of, even the termites couldn’t chew it.

 

 

[Like to drove me crazy]

 
Ann Fisher-Wirth

 

Like to drove me crazy

the cicadas in the privet and pecan trees

whupping up their little motors

all those nights

 

like beating the eggs for angel cake

I’d churn that eggbeater

faster and faster

till my hand got tired let it fall back quiet

 

then oh shoot eggwhites not stiff enough

so here we go again

 

and them crickets

chirping and buzzing all silvery and tinkly

summer nights as I laid by Bobby

 

one day he flipped his ATV

hurt his foot couldn’t drive no longer

so we retired

bought a cabin out by Sardis

 

but we were happy in that house

fan stirring            sheets damp

he’d lick the salt right off my neck

 

all those bugs clamoring up

like love

 

 

 

[You may not have these cushions]

 
Ann Fisher-Wirth

 

You may not have these cushions

they are the ones my dying aunt chose for me

 

you may not have these spoons

though they tarnish in my drawer

 

or the blankets

that I mended

 

look at this pretty blue plate

with the flowers

and the bird

 

look at this cast iron skillet

…

 

oh, go ahead                rise up

 

smear the boards

soak the house

 

until it buckles             until it cracks

 

 

and whoosh

 

with a sigh and            lip                    lip                    lip

it subsides

 

Don’t you know we’ll get away

 

don’t you know we’ll leave by boat

emergency is the having become

prayerful, bowers

its abrasive screening

of the weakest acute

 

continual emergence of

lineage, seep of forest,

poverties strong with life

which trees amplify

and redress, learn the garb

out of this much

 

not zigzagging litter

off a tree apportioning

the cull of feature

but rooted in a call legacy:

tangent replacement still not

absorbance’s effacement

 

sighs of emergent spares

unmuffled (prayers) by foliage,

shiver a post-saturate

symbolic, shielding direct

arrived as it out-

dressed the clearing

 

irreducible unseverable,

horizons disparate in hold

briefly centred at the

return-margin’s cover

 

nested emergent threshold

needs be tested, a modality

of symbolic interference

 

emergency rough-out

gives a further turn

through any inhaled habit,

selectivity re-tempers

its own projection (pro-

jettison) of texture

 

realm fitfully decoupled

but repercussant     as in

urgent ephemeral prayer

sustained in recess,

orbital skein of wander-

ing long the winding

 

a shared upframe over

the world’s enter forest,

began to co-flank

its shadings

 

particles misapplied

give to history its

canopies of revocation,

narrative detracts under

a welter of para-event

 

a host of trans-thoughts lend a species to prayer, no generals except shy incommensurate relata     supervenient, hyper-primitive     all too privative unless encoating the excess     dresses it in a poverty of unconditional access, escorting prayer along its meta-palpables

 

seed-scale according to

a tarnish of leaf-scarf:

dual-phase emergence,

refine the removals and

relayer the growth

 

a caritas among the

not-yet transformed,

interacts a whole al-

ready with its missing

parts, now emergence

inhabits lesser-towards

 

press no subfunction

but adjacent verticality,

prayer’s addressable

lattice slant-gained:

this leaf-coating is not

imitative register

 

how forests think forward

their banking on shelter,

any lumpen whole is the

greeter of the located

scum of its parts:

something else is redress

for a nothing but

 

branches already in being

hang over our opening, a

paucity sensing controvertibles

between closures of becoming:

hard encounter will promote

corrugated symbol

 

the dependency gives its

minute impact declaration,

set to a roof unachieved-re-

coverable: by which our

self-organisings are other-

prayered, screened

post-fractive

 

let emergence be a wholescale

revision of the earth’s crust,

tuft of air sought in

tail of leaf, winged against

unlatticed retorts of roof

 

is not a plate of

existence but a surface

in service of all other

covers, such layering

a horizon hovers for

1 Flow

through bone and brass I listen for the shore to crumble residue makes no noise       microscopic particles peel off the surface of the coast       with each wave                they bleed a little                 we hear the shore       through shells wood and wind the hum of particles loose and drowned unnoticing the cold weigh visitor-centre maps down with limpet shells       one crowns the corner on the left     creates island where there was perhaps an island       eroded dust settles down on that patch       the sand swells into a circularity a mass formed underneath                       just off the coast of Cornwall      the noise so low             that whole mounds move before the fishes notice               on a constant rise the sea bed is lifting      copying the limpet shell shape       on our maps reshaping us unaware of the storm                     the tide

 

2 Ebb

……………….unburied grass set in sand        the broken strings of bows rigid remembering past tension        the pull and snap of a sharp note        all that the musicians in us can do…………………..is revert to plucking…this…landscape dry sea water boils off at low tide a rusted cable cuts our shore in half……….a fold on the map in almost the same…place we can read the rocks and sing them       put these molluscs to music      the radula of a limpet polishing the brass    half-sunken……toothed….wrack…..twisting…..to…..the….melody hermit crabs scuttling to its rush     fossilized remains retranslated into a true sound……………………….of ourselves