forced poem

brevity is the soul of suck

word problem

Q54. One bird weighing 7 g departs Pelee Island, Ontario travelling southwest at an average rate of 43 km per hour on September 13th experiencing an average westerly cross wind of 10 km per hour. A second bird weighing 11 g departs East Fork State Park on September 17th travelling due west for 134 km at an average rate of 21km per hour with an average headwind of 6 km per hour before turning south and continuing at the same rate, experiencing the same 10 km per hour westerly crosswind as bird number 1. Assuming that daily foraging time for each bird is inversely proportional to mass divided by average daily energy expenditure and each mile travelled requires 4122 calories.

On what day will each bird arrive in Nashville?




There are several approaches to solve this problem:

Start with
the right-hand-rule,
given
I = S cos Z
where Z =
cos^-1(sin 36.1658º
sin [{23.4º*2
/(365.242/2)
*266}+{11.5[23.4º*2
/(365.242/2)]+-
23.4º}]+cos 36.1658
cos [{23.4º*2
/(365.242/2)
*266}+{11.5[23.4º*2/(365.242/2)]+-23.4º}]cos 15º(Time-12)
and the ever slanting 
dance of light filtered
through the understory;
the lingering chill 
in the dew
,and the lightning bugs
snuffed out like 
candles;
a subtle twist in the
seat of the soul
and the
irresistible
call of
Zugunruhe 

Or,
the heuristic approach:
watch the 12-day forecast
read the bird listservs daily
note the field marks
and check Sibley repeatedly

Or, for extra credit
integrate the obliquity,
eccentricity 
and 
precessional terms

Thuban drifts and winks over Gizeh
ice swells in the valleys 
and pours down across the continents
blitzkrieg by the millimeter-per-year
the little refugee camps 
adrift among the
Nunataks
playing the
Hardy Weinberg game
to pass the time

and the continent itself creaking out
and aft and up
like fingernails 
(everyone is always saying)

and even before that
the ripple through the Flora Family
the Devil's Tick
like a thumbprint pressed into wet clay
and later South America creeping up
to kiss the scar
down where the bugs never disappear
and the leaves never turn

and anyway all of these approaches converging
on the same results

these
  little
    drab 
olive and yellow 
  birds
   falling 
    from the sky 
and into our garden

on the crisp, unseasonably cool days
around the autumnal equinox
of 2012

and it's almost enough to make you think
the Mayan Long Count had it right
all along

The thing about

The thing about Stinkeye

and his family

and Büblè 

and his family

is you move

to a new city

and these guys

and their families

are some of your first

best

friends.

Poem for the posthuman commensals

the fields lie all fallow

the harvest is done

the cats are all feral

the mice breed and run

the barns tilt and bow

filled with swallows and owls

the chimneys are crumbling

swifts flood through the cowls

the cellars are sodden

now spiders hold court

the carpets are rotting 

and beetles make sport

the beds are unmade
the pantries are bare
the bug and the moth
must now seek other fare

with Germans, Norwegians, 

Americans expired

the rats and roaches

chart brand new empires

ghost fleets in the harbours 

list, founder and rust

the seal and porpoise

do not find it unjust

though lost in the shuffle
some lice a few mites
few lose any sleep
over parasite rights

the house is still home

for the finch and the sparrow

but no more will be built now

for time is an arrow

Stegner's Last Towhee

Somewhere past 

La Panza

roadrunner runs across the

road

and freezes 
with wings half-outstretched 

(a gesture shared with the

mockingbirds outside my window,

flushing up bugs across the

street and waging endless running battles

with the noisy robins

a perpetual avian gang war 

raging in 

this new old Nashville neighborhood)

perhaps to stun some torpid reptile

into fatal ectothermic hesitation,

or maybe as a futile bluff against the car,

this dead machine so brutally indifferent to

the subtle body languages of animals,

no way to tell
the great ground cuckoo
 (whose >< -shaped

zygodactyl footprints 
point forward and backward likea pair of antithetical logical operatorslocked in mutual nullification ormaybe reflected angles diverging toward infinite horizons 
past and future)

is already disappearing in the 

rearview as I silently name each bird

we pass as we wind down the 

entirety of

highway 58

red-tail, turkey condor, scrub jay, towhee, red-tail, quail

from my natal grounds about

the foggy upper reaches of the 

Salinas

and out across the sodic wastes 

and proto-solar scars of the 

Carrizo 

red-tail, kestrel, meadowlark

and over the gentle

earthly undulations of the 

San Andreas 

magpie, meadowlark, goldfinch, red-tail

and down the surprisingly 

short sharp scarp of the 

Temblors 

scrub jay, acorn woodpecker, crow, red-tail

and into the mostly motionless 

pumpjack forests 

of the McKittrick oil patch

starling, blackbird, rock doves

and out onto the not quite

completely-drained marshes

along the southern shore of

old gone 

Tulare Lake

littered with cotton and plastic

and great piles of Russian thistle 

stacked against the barbed-wire

egrets, harrier, gulls, starlings, blackbirds

through gritty 

Bakersfield

fast food and cheap fuel

and up, way up,

past the great cursive loop

that carries trains over the

Tehachapis 

where my good old gone dog 

Moose first puppy-frollicked 

in the snow

and Clyde now

in the back is 

nervous going 

up and over 

for the first time ever

(here where Laura Cunningham 

says imperial woodpeckers and thick-billed parrots

once, maybe, flew!)

and past the giant cement factory of 

Monolith

turkey condors, ravens, kestrel, red-tail

and down, down, down

between the giant white 

turbines slicing deadly huge

scythe-arcs through the sky

and the weird experimental

egg-beatery ones that must

have been a failure since

I never see them in any

other windfarm

and into clear 

and, even on this January day,

somehow blistering

Mojave 

past the glittering jet junkyard 

where the great

old yuccas have

replaced the oaks and pines

and junipers of the morning,

grackles on the move 

reserves for the vanguard 

wave pushing north toward 

Oregon already,

and then past

Boron

where great sweating teams eighteen mules

and two horses

dragged minerals out of the deserts 

and into the factories and wash basins

of the world 

and now I have either forgotten my game

or the birds are hiding 

in the hard, bright shadows

of the late afternoon desert in winter

and now a bathroom break

in Barstow 

and then onto the flat

black ribbon of interstate 

that will carry us to Arizona

with a choking radiator

into snowy Flagstaff,

Gallup, Alburquerque,

Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas,

Missouri, Illinois, Indiana,

Kentucky

and finally

down into Tennessee

right into this house

and this chair. 

But sitting here I still think about

that fat, spice-colored bird

–the one who once walked in through the open 

kitchen door, picking up errant quinoa 

from the floor, 

and I looked up from this computer,

2000 miles away,

and I said, "hey! what are YOU doing in here?" 

–way back in California.

Brood XIX

By the time we get to Nashville
the party is mostly over,
dead bodies strewn across the sidewalks.

"Two weeks ago,"
Says Dr. F, walking quite fast,
"We wouldn't have been able to hear
each other speak"

Waves to show the little space between us.

",above the noise."

Makes a sweeping gesture to the trees.
"I like it. It reminds me of growing up."

Down by the river,
desparate virgins lurk in the woods
wailing

(easy to take their songs for wails of frustration
these late-comers who might have missed their chance
but, of course
the male cries because that is all he knows how to do)

the path is studded with narrow wells
conduits to the past
and it's not too hard to count by thirteens
1998 - the Lewinsky brood
1985 - the Contra brood
1972 - the Watergate brood

only 14 broods back Old Hickory is in the White House, still grieving,

and wondering about his assets back in Hermitage.

He writes to brother of his just dead wife, son of the Col. founder of Nashborough,

June 7 1829 - To John Donelson
……………..
P.S. Mr. Steel has written me but one letter say to him to write me how much crop he has in, how many coalts, lambs & calves and how my last years coalts are–and of the health of my Negroes–I learn old Ned & Jack are both dead–Jack was a fine boy, but if hew was well attended to, I lament not–he has gone the way of all the earth–
[If the ages in the Hermitage register of 1829 are correct "Old" Ned, might have seen four broods, Jack, dead at 17, just missed seeing two.]

but the past is dead
the travails of man and bug are separate threads
they pull apart cleanly like an insect from its skin

we can search for meaning in the spectacle:
thirteen years of tax on the trees
sapped drop by drop by the waiting grub
then the explosion of screams and sex and death
the hungry mouths of birds
bodies dropping from the trees
a windfall paid back to the forest soil
less the hundred thousand eggs
stealed away in twigs
and some weeks hence
mostly unnoticed
a second rain
grubs fall to the soil
to burrow down,
down
through the husks of their ancestors
to search and find
the root

the promise of return
the fullness of the season and the gathering of things

but I'm afraid I've dug myself too deep
down here at the bottom of the well
staring up at my nearly teenage daughter
one brood hence
regarding me with exasperation.

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Rufous-sided Tiger-cart

unlike its northern cousin, the Rufous-sided Tiger-cart is a solitary creature. Much like a large constrictor it ambushes its prey and then retires to a secluded location to digest the meal which can take several weeks. This individual has only recently captured what appears to be a juvenile Silver Spinner although without a clear view of the field marks it is difficult to place it to species. There are no recorded attacks on humans, and clearly this cart was full and docile when I observed it. Nevertheless I kept a safe distance.