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Pleasure
Milker
–
Iguazu Falls, Argentina
You’re the kind who stands still
in front of awful things and squints
as though you could see into
the god chambers of every atom of every
drop of water. O! Maw of Fog.
O! Foam Throat. It’s hard to stare
at such a changing thing. Peel the surface
and the falls funnel back to drops,
jungles flee to seed – all that’s left
is lithosphere, scarred as it is.
Nothing to blaze the fix. Which
brings you to the time of lava.
Just a girl, the earth’s a short-winged
planet, hurtled shuddering
along her ellipse, humming slow
twenty octaves below middle E.
She flies low over the poor yards
of stars, fanning her boiling
organisms and polishing the dried char
off molten rock with still-glistening wings.
Soon, the ice-tipped spine. Soon, firesinge
of feathers, a fringe of green
below the chin. By now, drenched
as a fern, you resurface to the thundering
gush of falls. You filmy pilgrim,
you pleasure milker, you open your mouth
to sing as though it were a living thing.
The old girl’s gone to peat. You’re slick
with rain and heat and lift your feet
into the fragile air. But there’s a record here,
under the white veils of the river.
Mind's-Eyed
Island
Earth’s newest island is Surtsey.
It erupted above sea
level in 1963,
signaling in smoke, settling over the sea
in a slope of scoria – an island, we’ve decided,
where we’re not
allowed to live: only seals and fulmars,
guillemots and whooper swans.
In uninhabited ocean, Surtsey’s eruption
harmed no one, and
no one harms islands
on purpose, but then a booted foot,
a field of untrod ash…so hard to leave be
what the law ropes
off. Before signatures
on mainland pages paired the rim of Surtsey
with a hefty fee, a rebounding belt of ethics,
reporters for Paris
Match left southwest Iceland
for the newest shore along the Mid-Atlantic fissure.
They stayed fifteen minutes before the roaring,
airborne ash and fire
scared them back.
Then the eruption echoed in ink –
a surface to people with willow, rock pillow,
algae, sea –
they staked claims for the sake
of merely having seen. Little Surtsey adds itself to
the world,
brimming with news from the core. Her name is fire,
she’s an ingot,
she’s a blot. She‘s the coda of the long song
ice and fire sing.
I watched Surtsey be born again online –
the wing of a plane in the frame against Surtsey’s
plume of steam, its
billowing flag of cumulus
upping the clear skies, hazing its gray over the sun.
All that’s taken root arrived in the bellies of birds
and seals: this is
the fifteenth anniversary
of the discovery of a single earthworm burrowing itself
through Surtsey’s increasingly nutritious soil.
The island erupts
in thought –
a little boat over the blank reaches its resistance –
so glad there’s a where we can’t wreck,
where earth’s
beginning gets re-set. At the place
we can never see, where we’ll never set our feet,
grow ideas. Imagine how we’d hew a place to sleep
out of the solid rock
that waves won’t rock.
Moss under the shadow of the albatross,
and ash-halved boulders of pumice –
O, how they look like
a cluster of huts
that would shield the body from sun and dust.
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