physical systems of the environment

Today is a gloomy day. The clouds are low. The air is unstable. But the storms aren’t coming. Just little drops here and there. Today, a man in a large tractor drove all along the grass in the complex and sprayed it with chemicals. I won’t go into some long depressive discussion of cancer epidemics, chemical pollution, psalm 2:8 or the like. I’ll just say that today is a gloomy day, and I wish that I were lying in a field of dandelions.

A few years ago I went to New Orleans for a few days to visit a good friend at Tulane. I encountered all types of holiness there.

In another life, I hope to live in the quarter in the fall and write gothic novels.

I’m on my first week of summer holiday. Nothing has changed this week from last except that I feel like I’m doing nothing productive with my life. I’ve finished six poems about the Dust Bowl years, a current obsession of mine.

The Dust Storm Ends

All that returns
is beyond us –
the hides of scilla,
those tiny bells,
flat wheat
wedged between
our fingers,
the rain, too.

They return
one morning
before we wake,
as if they were there
all along,
invisible
behind the warring
dust, the dry soil
of our farm.

They come
back to life,
demanding
to be named,
like your body
when I hold you
as we make love
for the first time
since the storm.

Before going any further this summer with my sequence, I’m going to do a bit more reading. Specifically Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others and Haniel Long’s Pittsburgh Memoranda. The poet and general goddess of great wisdom, Maggie Anderson, gave me a nice list of suggested reading for my sequence on the Dust Bowl and Great Depression, and also told me to look up “depression” in the OED. My favorite definition, which is now rare or obsolete: defeat, suppression; degradation.

Right now I’m listening to one of those free CDs that they give out at the Discovery Channel store, the ones that have all of these brilliant artists from all over the world that play their instruments in a way that sounds just like the weather. Actually, I think I’ll end on that note. A bit more cheerful than the beginning.