D.E. Steward

Flowstone

“I am what I read, have read, am writing”  (John Kinsella)

Buoyed by the glory of Shostakovich’s Fifth, the Largo and the Allegro non troppo

The magnificently pensive middle theme of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata 30, Opus 109

As if umami infused

Succinctly:  “Humanity has wiped out 60% of mammals, birds, fish and reptiles since 1970”  (The Guardian Weekly)

Cogent causation, the ineluctable eustasy (sea level rise)

With ravenous economic development forcing the rest    

Wetlands, trees and ground cover topsoil graded off

The dismal urban drosscapes

Beton brutal

Nitrate and phosphate agrochemicals saturating streams, estuaries and rivers

Plastics and trash the oceans

Road traffic universally increasing

Thickest in cities where air carries increasing particulate matter, it’s the new tobacco

While noise and light pollution spreads wide from the urban swell

As world population bloats toward four billion more by the end of the century with three billion of those born to Africa

Derelict machines and construction trash dumps

The brownfields, vast hardscape tracts of broken asphalt and concrete with landfills everywhere, often responding to water table rise

“grid seepage, currents distracted / side flow, multiple laterals”  (A. R. Ammons)

Single-species tree and crop plantations and turf farms protected chemically replace mixed agriculture

All with the petty revulsions of strip malls, leaf blowers, windblown plastic bags

"Destruction of the natural world is not the result of global capitalism, industrialization, 'Western civilization' or any flaw in human institutions. It is a consequence of the evolutionary success of an exceptionally rapacious primate."  (John Gray)

Sixty years on mining the bitcoin burns more electricity than that generated by the whole world’s solar panels

An inkling from being caught in the open for long minutes in a red dust storm on the Llanos Esticados in 1958

Needing to go prone face in crossed arms to keep from choking

“And knowing what time is, and where it goes. / Deep on the ocean floor, the lava flows”  (Clive James)

Then living quietly in the presence of high mountains

“And the warm wind is tender and supple. / And the body marvels at its lightness”  (Anna Akhmatova)  

The improbable complexity and riveting beauty of Heinz Holliger’s enhancement of Alessandro Marcello’s, the eighteenth-century Venetian, Oboe Concerto

Resonant and driving like Kampala Highlife one night in 1963 Uganda

African days before AIDS when only rarely people talked of “slims,” when the disease hazards were bilharzia and malaria, and most maladies for a flying doctor in Lesotho were bacterial infections and broken bones

Would see happy Heinz Holliger, nearly an octogenarian now, almost dancing onto the tram, early balding with a token pony tail, oboe case in hand, after Roger Federer, the best known Basler of the era

Holliger’s definitions of it being the ultimate meaning of the oboe

In the manner of Calabi-Yau space’s extra dimensions within the universe

Beyond

“We fly in now, our voyage just begun – / To catch the giant sling swung by the sun”  (Clive James)

Visiting lesbian friends after an international flight, no shower proffered, a tentative meal in the kitchen, and then relegation to sleeping in their barn

Their amiable dogs stayed around with me out there and I found a garden hose to wash, it was pleasant with a blanket on that summer’s red-clover aromatic hay

Maybe such disconnectedness is another self-obscured mystery, or maybe it only has to do with others’ identities not mine

If I’d only known I’d ’ve

Flip the gender coin and puzzle over the mano á mano aspect of getting along with other men in situations with the sense that often when two confident men converse, one walks away the winner

To take a person’s karma onto yourself in order to enhance yours gets complicated

We still kill one another

Thunder in the clouds

Ammoniate cow piss stink

Among trash along the tracks were spikes, tie plates and other railroad gubbins

Busy end of summer cardinals tsping and calling to one another in the early dusk before they go to roost off in an evergreen

At dawn a spider web with twelve-foot silk filament guy line twelve feet off to a white pine’s drooping bough tip

The rising sun’s sparkle on the web itself

As if “lofting / you beyond all binds and terminals”  (Ammons) 

Plate-sized web strung between twig-tip points on a six-foot spruce

Wonder, in a mild koan, how the weaver reached the high pine bough last night

Gerald Stern notices such details in nature, sometimes with the no-holds-barred energy of a Christian ecstasy poet

Of the eighteen NYC Barnes & Noble “Events” listed in a February 1, 2019 display ad only two are readily recognizable names

“we are in America and it is all right not to be elsewhere”  (Frank O’Hara) 

Look up at those oak beams that were cut with a two-man ramp saw and hewn by people who were around for the American Revolution

Set there as if forever like the classical splendor of Haydn’s “London,” the 104th

By those who farmed by fieldstone walls with scythes and hayforks, some of whom walked off westward through the Cumberland Gap

Men in blue who carried an Enfield 1853 rifled musket south over the Potomac 

Or may have lived their life on farms in one county and died toothless at fifty-five

The interval between that rural past of ours and now confounds those who remember

“way beyond gusting down the long changes”  (Ammons)

When water trickles down a cave wall it may leave a translucent curtain of minerals called flowstone

Flowstone containing uranium decays steadily allowing accurate dating of wall painting beneath the curtain

The painters were exactly like us of course 

The strangeness for us on the live side of the screen, off in front of the flowstone, is that their consciousness, both animals’ and their artists’, are inexplicitly present but absolutely gone

Tussocky grass shaggily appearing through the melting snow under southwest wind blowing cumulus

It is another March now

“In one month / the twigs will be shining”   (Gerald Stern)

And we will go on ahead further into our seasons

Without hindrances except for our era’s recently crisp, sinister uneasiness  

 

Woke

Two poets at a time one after the other for a half hour or so every day, early

Pages turned in curiosity about the next poem

Like following around a small brown plains-wanderer in central Vics

In Broome out in Western Australia, sunhats, white cars and utes, and roofs

The norm

“Ground baked so hard you can only scrape / and pick at it, occasionally shattering / into sheets and chips...”  (John Kinsella)

Contingent with the Great Sandy Desert

Inside 18° South, southwest of the Kimberley Plateau

Back of beyond out there

Broome’s remarkable Japanese Cemetery

The archeology of almost a century of pearl diving

Over nine hundred divers’ graves

From the bends or lost in typhoons

To that coast from their home islands

For the pearl oysters, Pinctada Maxima

A bonanza oblivious to time passed time

“This open-sky / dungeon of colonial heritage”  (Kinsella)

The nearly unpolluted southern hemisphere’s blue sky

Confluent with gwander, mulga, dugite, death adder, tiger snake, king browns

Vividly brutal like pig hunting with dogs in New South Wales

An Oklahoma truck meetup out of town to sight in AR15s

And it is a matter of Trump, nearly ninety percent of Cameron County, Pennsylvania, population forty-five hundred

Perhaps a couple of thousand counties from Florida to Nome bend like it

Most of the eighty-eight counties in Ohio alone

Unwoke

Where it’s felt that he’s their best chance at something or other

After all at the 2023 CPAC this weekend as keynoter he proclaimed, “I am your justice, I am your redeemer”

“And if we don’t win we won’t have a country.” 

Many of those good people, confident that Trump is for them in their time

Continue to shunt normal practices and ethics off to starboard 

“…the chill and lull / of 39,000 feet, for there we felt, I’m not sure / how to say this, somehow American…” (William Matthews, Search Party)

Trumpismo’s smell

The unwoken doom of the world overcome from civility with crowding and conflict

Pushed into camps of affluence glut and deepening poverty

Here encouraged purposefully or not, by the push and blather of the American right dealing backward in realms of historical awareness

In tactics of manipulative greed

If its governing segment manages further crimes of state like Bush II’s torture program after 9/11 and Trump’s Mexican border family separation policy, we’re on the mule run to that, to our particular modes of apartheid and Auschwitz

Their theme an alternate history founded by three and a half centuries of institutionalized slavery, Manifest Destiny’s Indian policies and practice, the Oriental Exclusion Act, the Palmer Raids, McCarthyism, Reagan’s “government is the problem,” and now Trump

“Nothing worse than the cold cry of snow”  (Kenneth Patchen)

There’s a particular and deep sink into the sinister

State governments are now enacting abortion pill prohibition, debating regulating transgender lives and anti-drag show legislation

And we have woke books in the schools controversies, the House’s absurd weaponization committee and a general tenor of rightwing paranoia on the loose 

Their no holds barred disputations about wokeness may go deeper than our social democratic instincts 

What an implausible cast of self-promotion politicians are out there now 

Whelping libertarian/anarchists and the avoidant personalities supporting Trump

Their woke credo of open carry, stare you down, keep what’s yours

“the coldness, rigidity, and calculation of an acquisitive spirit”  (Elizabeth Hardwick)

As if tattooed on their noggins In dogged certainty, “Americans”

In our exclusionary patriotic certitude

Our identity proven by having given Trump a presidential term

A week in Quentin Massys’ Antwerp, waiting to sail to Jersey City as supercargo on the Finnish MS Wilke

A singular city

Antwerp’s painters alone, Rubens, van Cleve, Frans Hals, van Dyck, both Bruegels, and through the centuries the couple of hundred more 

Jean Genet even lived there

Right back then into my early Sixties New York of agents and editors

A half dozen near misses, the interviews and rendezvous, perpetual hope and the tendered glad-handed promises

Even rewriting a novel, All of Us Were Born Here, for Braziller without a contract, a you’re-the-victim-and-we-all-know-it as the non-deal drifted away

With Braziller’s earnest attention but edgily too innocent-arrogant to perceive the unique implications and benefits of publishing a novel with them

Braziller top drawer then, not Doubleday or Simon & Schuster

My chance blown by me myself

Needing to travel and write

Not to stay put and self-promote

Assuredly not wanting to plot a career of living in New York trying to make it from a first novel 

Or it might have been a gay nuanced situation for their editor who let it drop

The petty sexual hints and ploys that they took so seriously in publishing deals

With another eager writer in his twenties

Hot to go

Facing it

But falling away

Careers in letters

Fortunately, it was my assumptive terms not their balanced trade ones

And then Boston's always further than you think

Those were the years of a college friend giving themself a year to write poetry

They believed poetry could give them almost everything

“Education, then, is a sort of option, a curious settling down of the American half-serious utopian claim.”  (Elizabeth Hardwick)

They would mimic Kerouac’s Washington Square sarcasms, “art-ers” and “interesteds,” Kerouac’s “piss and pulque” cool stance

But the clock was running

Last heard they was sliding carefully into a big university deanship

Bet they kept at it, mightily flashing phrases like “coarsely poetic,” “obviously significant rhyme scheme,” “underlying paradoxes”

People stay the same

Still this, still that

“We know you can never do it properly — once and for all. Passion is never enough, neither is skill. But try.”  (Toni Morrison)

The sublime of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No 30 in E Major

Glenn Gould’s version as different from the usual and from Alicia de Larrocha’s as Broome is from Boston

Vehement philippic  (Canto LXV)

“Before you leave here, sir, you’re going to learn that one of the most brutal things in the world is your average 19-year-old American boy”  (a Marine sergeant to Philip Caputo, Vietnam 1965)

It used to be called civics, the middle or high school exposure to democratic government and constitutionality

Those who sat in the back would ridicule anything so organized, the that of it, balance of powers, the rights and duties

Those louts have taken over the red Republican zone are in charge and gearing up

They have caches of resentment and equipment

They have the bucks, novitiates and camp followers

They’re ready to go

“Days burning with glare”  (Kinsella)

As with Lime :: Limón, apparent like twin colons, and functions, often, like an equal sign, allowing linguistic traffic to flow back and forth between apparently opposed, though weirdly interchangeable, states — lime and lemon

: : also bringing up the symbol used to bridge analogies in formal logic

We ponder dead cultures like zoo visitors chuckling at the so-like-us bonobos

And then glide off on ahead

Like the harsh chig-chig call of a red-bellied woodpecker in sun glare in a high white ash

Like the upbeat feeling of those at a well digger’s rig, put on blocks, three days of flush and pounding to forty gallons a minute water at seventy feet   

As the supersede loud equipment backup beeping is to the new and emphatic dry ratcheting racket of big electric Amazon home delivery vans backing

Already well into the twenty-first’s third decade

It’s happening

We’re fired up

We’re stoked

We’re woke

 

D. E. Steward mainly writes months. Most of them are published, as is much of his short poetry. Five volumes of his months came out in 2018 as Chroma.