Tuesday, December 19, 2023

19 December 2023: Winter turns the world green

 

After the rain, mowers; after the mowers, rain. Clothes pins of a single note hang outside, sonic variations behind, from splattering to whisper. The nurse stood behind me, whispering names for animals; when I said “gorilla,” we knew my hearing would suffice. If this season is winter, then why neglect my winter photographs? Isn't it possible to have palm trees in winter, or must winter be renamed summer, trans-seasoned? Have we busted up the entire metaphorical field? If your winter’s barren of leaves, mine fills with them. If your winter prepares you for death, mine gestures toward constancy. Rodger says he'll miss this world; he posts a photograph of a bee and a flower, not arthritic branches, or roots’ broken wrists. If I peer into the parking lot drain, will I find a drowned sonnet, unfurling like an exhausted flag, melting toward the ocean. Not a plastic patch, but a poetic one. Go gather your alphabets where you may, then watch them come ashore like micro-trash, but more beneficent. Make garlands of these cast offs, put them around your neck or scalp, tease out their messages from the sea’s disorder. You sing beyond the chaos of the sea. Two boys held up their tako, for bait. Smart, but.


Apple weather has nothing to do with fruit. Cinnamon apple sauce from Ecuador contains lead in it. Apples in Ecuador? Another season change, the one means of production creates to feed the world’s economy of desire. No one needs apple sauce from Ecuador, especially not now that it poisons you. To eat an apple in Spring confuses the seasons, though they might be tart, like Ashbery’s. With climate change, I might be a bridesmaid in November, a pall bearer in May. Alteration finds itself driven by engines of commerce. The December mower works between rain showers; growth slows, but only because rain beats it back. You’ll need AI to recover analogue sonnets, those that slowly informed their pre-assigned structure. I’d like you to elucidate your own traditions, I told my students; no matter that Eliot was a bad man. Or Pound. Take their examples; change the season. Pound took China, so take Pound, put him in a headlock, and leave him to thrash on his own ground. I never liked to think of literature as battlefield, but I venture there now. Old guns are trained on a field of soy beans, unharvested. The new economy breeds new diets. Spring melt comes any day now.

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