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Heterotroph

Posted in Ecopoetry, Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on June 9, 2023| 9 Comments »

[with 3 selections from Tar River Poetry]
. 
Letter to the Archaeologists of the Post-Anthropocene
. 
You know already what fools we were,
how like the dog that starts itself awake
. 
we jumped and bared our teeth
and turned to chase our tail, our fury
. 
rising as we spun – and how, unlike the dog,
we did not hold our caught selves
. 
gently, surprised to be at once the captive
and the captor, but chewed our own flesh
. 
bloody, sure we were destroying that
which would destroy us. You already know
. 
we killed our saviors, set fire
to our home, and ate
. 
our bitter hearts. We said
because we owned what we destroyed
. 
it was ours for the destruction,
and we destroyed it
. 
to prove that it was ours.
You know all that.
. 
You may not know, however,
just how much
. 
we loved what we destroyed, how much
we longed to have it love us –
. 
how even the cruelest among us
would stop sometimes to watch
. 
the polluted sky at sunset
turning gold then pink then indigo.
. 
Shane Sheely
from Tar River Poetry, Volume 62, Number 2. Spring 2023. © 2023 TRP
. 
❦ ❦ ❦
. 
Some ten years ago I became a phyto-heterotroph. Many people have asked whether it was a difficult transition and whether I have regrets. Not at all! To borrow a phrase from the general domain of heterotrophs, “Life is good.”
. 
This week I’ve been reintroduced to a community of fellow heterotrophs after a year’s absence. We met in the woods on Grassy Creek’s Forest Bathing trail as they emerged  from the shady gloom, pale as the moon, a little creepy. Their scaly jointed fingers that are not fingers poked up from the leaf mould. They nodded their heads which are not heads. Not human, not fungus. What?
. 
These are plants, flowering plants, but stark white, utterly absent chlorophyll : Ghost Pipes (Heath family, Ericaceae, same family as rhododendron, azalea, huckleberry, but so eerily different). Kneel to inspect the nodding head and you’ll see that it’s a flower, one at the apex of each stem, and indeed shaped like the flowers on my blueberry bushes beside the driveway. I remember the first time I saw these odd creatures in the southern Appalachians, thriving in rich mesic woodland, clustered in deep shade with no need for photons. I was taught that they are white because they’re parasitic, taking nourishment from the roots of trees.
. 
Heterotrophic – fed by others. The opposite of autotrophic, feeding oneself. Most of the Plant Kingdom are autotrophs, industriously creating sugar and cellulose from the nothing of light and CO2. Quite a number in Kingdom Protist are autotrophs (algae, for example), and even a few in the Bacteria Kingdom (cyanobacteria). All the rest of us are unable to feed ourselves. I can make Vitamin D when sunlight strikes my skin, but as an obligate heterotroph I must consume autotrophs to survive.
. 
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Personal and Planetary Health—The Connection With Dietary Choices. This is the title of a feature editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Society (June 6, 2023; Volume 329, Number 21). It isn’t difficult to imagine the message the editorialist will promote, but it is novel to emphasize the connection between choices that lead to personal well-being and and choices that promote global health. To quote: Physicians have historically focused on patient health and relegated planetary health to environmentalists and lawmakers. However, dietary choices are the largest driver of chronic diseases. National surveys indicate less than 5% of the US population meets dietary fiber recommendations due to inadequate plant-based food intake. Plant-based diets are also associated with reduced incidence of chronic diseases such as obesity, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, chronic kidney disease, and cancer in multiple studies.
. 
I became a phyto-heterotroph (it’s easier to spell vegetarian) not for personal health but to reduce my ecological footprint. Eating plants instead of eating things that eat plants has a frankly unbelieveable impact on agricultural water consumption, loss of habitat to grazing and animal feedstock production, and methane and nitrous oxide production (25 times and 298 times more potent greenhouse gases than CO2). Even the most diehard omni-heterotroph could probably tolerate a phyto-heterotroph diet one or two days a week.
. 
And those Ghost Pipes (Monotropa uniflora) – I read this week that they are actually myco-heterotrophs. Their roots entangle with and suck sugar from the fungal filaments of the mycorrhizal network that permeates all healthy soil. Alas, all fungi are themselves heterotrophs. They reciprocate with green plants to provide minerals and water in exchange for sugar, some of which they evidently pass on to the Ghost Pipes. Without GREEN, none of us would be here.
. 
❦ ❦ ❦
. 
Because the Demented World Repeats Itself
. 
In Europe again tonight,
a human being is dying
. 
under a bombed-to-rubble house
or in the street – bicycle basket
. 
spilling its loaf of bread.
This particular human is dying
. 
whose dying makes me despair
though I’m no one in particular
. 
and they’re no one in particular
to me. I’m just another human
. 
who will be dying, but not yet,
and who lies warm under my quilt
. 
of many blessings, wondering
what can be done about humans
. 
when I can’t dissuade the sparrow
who attacks our window
. 
slamming and slamming
his reflection – the enemy
. 
he keeps seeing but not
seeing as himself.
. 
Susan Cohen
from Tar River Poetry, Volume 62, Number 2. Spring 2023. © 2023 TRP
. 
❦ ❦ ❦
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I don’t subscribe to many literary journals, but I don’t let my Tar River Poetry lapse. Volume 62/Number 2 arrived last week containing a few familiar names but many more names that I now want to remain familiar with. Micro-themes seem to weave through its fifty pages of poetry like a carrier wave that fills the room with music. A few poems juxtaposed are having a conversation, but when the next in line picks up the thread the color and texture have suddenly shifted again. Always something new, always engaging, deeply felt, deeply connecting. Thank you to Luke Whisnant and all the perceptive editors who send me a fresh volume twice a year.
. 
Tar River Poetry is published twice yearly with the support of the Department of English, East Carolina University. http://tarriverpoetry.com. 113 Erwin Hall, Mail Stop 159, ECU, East Fifth Street, Greenville NC 27858-4353.
Shane Sheely has published three books of poetry and directs and teaches in the creative writing MFA program at University of Missouri-St. Louis.
Susan Cohen, author of three full-length poetry collections, is a former journalist living in Berkeley, California.
Steve Cushman’s first poetry collection, How Birds Fly, won the 2018 Lena Shull Book Award of the North Carolina Poetry Society.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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The Candiru Fish is So Small It Could Swim Up Your Urethra
. 
is what Mrs. Hart, my 9th grade biology teacher, said
thirty-some years ago, so when Julie says let’s go skinny
. 
dipping, instead of being excited I’m transported back to
Mrs. Hart’s class in St. Petersburg where all we had to cool
. 
us off on those Florida afternoons was one lone window unit,
so we sweated through her lectures until the day we sat up
. 
straight and listened as she discussed urethras and penises
and the dangers lurking beneath the surface. Come on, Julie
. 
is saying, naked now, her clothes in a stack at the shore,
her pale shoulders bouncing up and down at the water’s surface.
. 
I strip bare, tell myself we’re nowhere near the Amazon River,
run with everything I have into the water, into Julie’s arms,
. 
and again she’s rescuing me from myself, from my silly fears,
and those murky, dangerous things, seen and unseen.
. 
Steve Cushman
from Tar River Poetry, Volume 62, Number 2. Spring 2023. © 2023 TRP
. 
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Doughton Park Tree 2020-11-22
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Dave Manning, Human Nature, and That Other Apple (2)

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , , , on May 5, 2023| 2 Comments »

[This is a re-posting of one of my personal favorites, from July 27, 2020. May we each discover what is most perfectly suited to our individual nature; may we discover the perfect curvature and gravity of the universe. And may we continue to re-discover the poetry of the late David Treadway Manning, one of my favorite human beings.

I am re-posting rather than creating an original offering for this date because our neighborhood is still digging out from a tornado that struck us on April 28, 2023. No people injured, many hundreds of trees down, brighter wider horizons absent their green banners, a few nights of darker skies and brighter stars and the company of the waxing moon.    —-   Bill ]

Young Isaac is strolling through the orchard, another undifferentiated non-linear autumn afternoon of this perplexing equation we call life. Some of the fruit has detached itself and translocated several meters closer to the center of the earth. It has begun, with the help of fermenting microorganisms, to succumb to entropy. Isaac steps in it. He slips.

Isaac’s 70 kilograms, density of water, accelerate at 9.8 meters per second per second. Suddenly prone, the gravity of the situation strikes him. There, 10 centimeters from the tip of his nose, lies a perfect red spheroid. Glossy. Fragrant. The tiny lenticels on its taut unblemished skin are arranged with the symmetry of stars distributed across the heavenly sphere. “What an apple!” young Isaac exclaims, “Artios!” (his years of Greek instruction now finally relevant): That which is perfectly suited to its nature. The essence of appleness.

And how will Isaac’s own essence be transformed by this epiphany? How will yours and mine? No longer undifferentiated, will he discover his many gifts and their ideal trajectory? Will we ours? For are we not each of us an essence, our process of formation either distracted and garbled by the noisy physics of our history and our surroundings or alternatively able to grasp that trajectory perfectly suited to our unique nature? Besides mass and density and the ability to struggle upright against gravity, don’t we human animals also possess the agency of choice and change and discovery?

Isaac sits up and regards the apple. You know where this is headed. It will be 218 years before young Albert slips and falls and realizes that what Isaac experienced is actually the curvature of space. Meanwhile why don’t we all, each of us, sit up and regard our nature. Artios! To become that which is the perfect expression of our nature. It’s about time.

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I have been a DAVID MANNING fan since I first sat up and discovered poetry. Whether he does it with a compassion that draws me deeper into the circle of human family or with a wry and pointed barb that makes me snort, he regards human nature and tells its truths. I will be the first person in line when his NEW AND SELECTED is released from PRESS 53 later this year.

And I have been favored to preview the manuscript. Wandering these wonderful poems spanning decades I enter an inner landscape and pass from reader to personal companion. There is a deep imagination at work; there is joy and no lack of laughter and sometimes a little weirdness; there are bright moments of insight and connection.

Most of all there is WONDER. No aspect of our human situation or our confounding universe goes unnoticed. David’s artistry gathers a desert landscape, a snatch of opera, a funky conversation and weaves from them with perfect sense and sensitivity an affirmation. When I reach the final page I say, “YES, that is the way it is.”

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Sailing with Anne

Santa Monica, California, 1950

After her sailing class we cast off
into the ruffled Pacific blue, tide
incoming, echoes of great breakers
lapping the dock. She-the sailor,
the tiller, mine.

As we headed west, tacking
into a strong breeze I remember
marveling at who she was
to do these things. I imagined her
at the helm become Anne Bonny,
running a four-master down,
the setting sun turning red lights
in her hair.

I hope we left something there-
if only a boat paint-scrape
or salt spray from her hair.
Maybe something from that day
was never lost, but joined
the Pacific’s history, some trace
still riding the blue circuit
between the poles, with the sea-grape
and tiny life that make the coral.

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Star Journey

Sometimes at night I return

to the Griffith Park planetarium

where stars from the surrounding hills

come out to music.

North of Los Feliz

I step from city lights into the night

sky of Patagonia with its wind-swept shores

under the warm lights of Fornax,

Fomalhaut, Alpha Crucis, a bright canopy

of southern stars, to music-Gymnopedie,

Satie’s barefoot dance.

Then, under the soft night sky,

I take off my shoes

and find my way into the stars.

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David Manning’s NEW AND SELECTED POEMS is anticipated later this year from Press 53.

Star Journey first appeared in KaKalaK 2017 – Anthology of Carolina Poets
Sailing with Anne first appeared in Pinesong: The North Carolina Poetry Society

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Three Violets

Posted in Ecopoetry, Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , on April 28, 2023| 3 Comments »

[ with 3 poems by Jane Mead]

In Need of a World

Who wouldn’t want a life
made real by the passage of time
or a world, at least,
made real by the mind. Something
solid and outer, though connected.

Who wouldn’t want to know
for certain how to get there?

I’d like to tell you simply
how I passed this day putting tomatoes up,
or how I tied a stern cicada to a string
so I could feel the gentle tug
its flying in frantic circles made.

I’d like to show you the red
worm-shaped burn on my wrist
and in this way claim myself.

Instead I slip out of my every day –
away into the distant and lulling sound
of “once-upon-a-time-there-was-a-woman.”

Will I ever find that perfect stance
of soul and mind from which sparks
a self uttering itself?
I’m always slipping between rows of corn –
through the field that rises toward this ridge
from which I like the houses for their smallness.

Here I lean against a Honey Locust,
feathery tree with its three-inch thorns,
and watch sagging strands of barbed wire
sway slightly in the wind – the clump
of brown fur hanging there, waving.

I watch the field of drying corn beyond,
and beyond that the soccer field
and rows of clean-lined condos.
I wait for the yellow light to flick on
in the white church across the valley.

Will I ever learn the way to love
the ordinary things I love to look at?

I’m always slipping away
between rows of corn, climbing
toward this ridge to think,
when really what I want is a ridge
or a lonely field on the edge of the world
of the mind. A place from which to speak
honestly to that man on the porch, a way
to greet the children who are swinging
on the edge of duck behind chain-link fences.

But always it’s either I or world.
World or I.

And when it’s I, I’m dreaming
on a quiet ridge that the tomatoes
ripened and, though I was missing,
a woman put an apron on and canned them.
And when it’s world, it pushes me back
toward that madness of the soul
which is not a field, nor a ridge, nor a way.

Jane Mead
from To the Wren, collected & new poems 1991-2019; Alice James Books, Farmington, Maine; © 2019

❦ ❦ ❦

I am sitting at the kitchen table reading these poems by Jane Mead when Linda asks me if I have any trash that needs to go out. I am sitting at the kitchen table because if I sit at my desk I will remember all the things that need to be done but that are not reading poems by Jane Mead. Of the things I will remember sitting at my desk some are a chore, like writing checks, and some are sober, like checking in with Dad to see if he is still having pain, and although reading Jane Mead is not a chore the poems are certainly sober. She makes me wonder: will there be a moment later today or tomorrow to sit and stare into the green chapel of April and ponder who I am?

Yesterday walking the Forest Bathing Trail, Linda and I saw three violets that are not the rampant purple violets that fill the rest of the world. One by one during the weeks of April we have learned their three names. They are small, they are just a few, they are precious. Their rampant purple cousins whose flowers are crafty enough to duck beneath the mower blades, who make many, many seeds, and who have perfected the concept of ‘spread’, they, too, are precious. Will there be a moment later today or tomorrow to sit and consider the insignificance of violets and consider whether, perhaps, all things and all moments are precious?

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Sparrow, My Sparrow

The voice that loves me best when I am dreaming
comes from every corner of the circle of my sleep
speaking in the sound of my own drowning.
She says the body’s just a habit getting old,
a crystal turning on a nerve of ancient longing.
She says I will teach you how to be with yourself
always, she says we do not live in the same world.

All this is just an allegory for the truth.
Truth is, I cannot speak
the voice that I’ve been dreaming.
Truth is, the slate sky darkens,
clouds of sparrows heave in the wind,
the trees are massed with sparrows screaming
and the fields are dotted with them.
The birds are bracing themselves. The birds
are frenzied by something about to happen.

Truth is, I have my feet on the slimy banks.
I look for my face in the murk-green river
and the water’s surface does not change.

But I hear myself in the screech of sparrow
and am panicked by something about to happen.

Slate sky – darkened; sound in wind:
I enter this world like myself as a prayer.
I enter this world as myself.
I cannot help myself.

What is a prayer but a song of longing
turning on the thread of its own history?

I feel myself loved by a voice in the wind –
I cover my ears with my palms.
The whole world rocks and still
the cold green river does not spill.

Jane Mead
from To the Wren, collected & new poems 1991-2019; Alice James Books, Farmington, Maine; © 2019

 

❦ ❦ ❦

The Man in the Poetry Lounge

at Berkeley is reading English
pastoral poetry with passive
abandon, chewing his thumbnail
aggressively. He wants

to see grass, he wants to
BE grass so badly he can
almost smell it. Outside,
they are cutting the grass—

the man and the mower—they are
dressing and keeping the garden.
They are not far enough away
from my hay fever, but the man

reading pastorals is off—
zeroing in on calmer places.
Have the birds arrived yet?
Have the larks and nightingales

made their appearance? I would like
to ask him to let me know
when he gets to the birds. I would like
to concentrate then and there, and lose

what I have read about Flanders
and Picardy and the trenches of W.W.I:
the larks appearing around the time
of stand-to in the morning,

the nightingales showing up
by stand-to at night. I would like never
to have learned that they were there.
But instead, because my nose is running,

my eyes are getting smaller by the minute,
and I’m edgy, I’ll ask him sweetly
if he’s bothered at home
by bedbugs, rats, or lice,

and justify the question with an explanation:
I myself am bothered by fleas.
This is why I keep scratching—
which act I hope he does not find

distracting because, really,
who am I to ruin his birds.
I who cannot, as you have seen,
follow those trenches to their

logical conclusion. Instead, I too
have searched long, and found
that in the gentle arc
of a pig’s back there really is

a thought to calm the thinker—
if, that is, the pig be tame.
I want to know if this man
loves what he is reading—

and if he loves it enough
in what way it will change him.
Are we onto something real now
or is this all about planting

a false goose in front of the moon?
Do the iambics soothe him? Is he
big on true rhyme and false conclusion,
the sonic hanky—you wipe your eyes

you blow your nose. Which I will
have to leave this room to do.
But not before I’ve resisted
coming right out and asking

if he’s fulfilling the requirements
of heart or mind, and asked instead
what it’s my true right to know
(involving, as it does, the heat

of concentration and the problem
of public safety, as in MY safety):
if his shirt, which I’ll begin
by calling handsome, has passed

the requirements of the Flammable
Fabrics Act. Then I’ll
step out and blow my nose,
at which point I might as well wander

back on down toward Cody’s and try
to receive the world, browsing
and scratching in the poetry section,
after buying a paper poppy for a dollar—

the one you didn’t want to know was coming—
the Flanders—from a veteran of foreign wars
at Telegraph and Durant—not,
of course, looking at his left leg—

because I can’t.
Because it isn’t there.

Jane Mead
from To the Wren, collected & new poems 1991-2019; Alice James Books, Farmington, Maine; © 2019

❦ ❦ ❦

Given the nearly complete destruction of an entire planet, the overpowering by greed of any sense of the basic logic of survival, or valuation of beauty — it would be odd if the urgency of this situation were not reflected in our poetry. But poetry has the potential to move people, which is where the potential for growth and change of a certain kind enters the picture.
+++++++++++++++ Jane, Mead, from a 2014 online interview,
+++++++++++++++ recalled in her obituary in the Los Angeles Times

Jane Mead died in 2019 at the age of 61. She was a Griffin Poetry Prize and Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist for her 2016 book World of Made and Unmade, about her mother’s death. Her previous book of ecopoetry, Money Money Money Water Water Water, explores the widespread destruction of the natural world.

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