Home >  Monthly Archives: August 2014

140 / 23
 
Nostalgia's
a window
I won't look out_

Those stories
just remind me

What was
undone then
is undone now.

And time
is running down.
[120]

1024 / 12

Aldo Leopold

The year before his death in 1949, Aldo Leopold published A Sand County Almanac, a book to be read as much for its prose as its philosophy. Leopold’s writing is surpassingly fluent, leathery, vivid. A favorite passage: “One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of a March thaw, is the spring.”

Leopold called for a “land ethic,” an evolution of ethics that balanced the interests of the biotic community with human desires. He understood that the cultural values that underpinned public and private action had to be reworked if there was to be any hope of slowing the decimation of America’s wilderness.

Leopold sought not only to shape ethics, but aesthetics. He recognized a paradox at the heart of conservation—that the more people are drawn to the wilderness, the more they tread upon it. He advocated uses of the land that would enhance its admiration while leaving sufficient wilderness for study and preservation.

Today, the successes of American environmentalism are uneven. The law remains obsessed with land as commodity, held in fee simple absolute. Yet Leopold still amazes, with the equipoise of prose and the depth of his thinking.

[199]

140 / 24
 
But Aldo, the city suits me.
I like the grit,
  salt dried streets,
The natural wonder of
girls going by_
  hitch jackets.
  riding boots.
[132]

200 / 18
 
No partner in the history of
	Williams, White, Tearney, Case and Carver
Ever slouched on a cement bollard
At the doors of Paddington Station, 
	Drank two pound Spanish red
	From a screw top bottle.

Good chance that any lad 
	Who ever did 
	Never filed brief
	In the second circuit.

And some blokes never leave their village.
	Some mice never leave their wall.
[62]

140 / 26
 
being_
something’s unbearable about it.
not the lightness.

my money’s
on the lifting_

the space left by task,
filled with decision.
[125]

1024 / 13

Invader_1

INVADER. May 27, 1940. The caption overlays the image like a transparency, putting a meaning on it. The INVADER is a German soldier; he stands for strength and aggression. The date is a caption; this is before Pearl Harbor, before intervention, the Final Solution, before Normandy, the Bulge, before Dresden, before surrender, division, the Cold War, and all that followed. 10 cents is a caption—an economy, now quaint, wherein a thin dime still had value. LIFE is a caption, recalling an era when the magazine still commanded attention. Lastly falls this caption, and suggests that all that came before was what it was, but was also, however faintly, about meaning.

[108]

140 / 27
 
We hiked until our asses chapped,
Sang jodies down the logging roads.
Thin as fawns, green as ferns,
Learning how to love.
[119]

200 / 19
 
Our old solid state
hummed like a death ray warming up.
I dashed to the kitchen to fetch a snack.

The racket proceeded pictures
and I caught a confrontation mid-stream
as two jealous lovers 
volleyed threats in the living room.

I stepped in just as the woman screamed,
	“Get out!”

And followed her finger_
The cat lay swathed in afternoon
	on the window sill.

//TELEVISION_4//
[65]

140 / 28
 
How can you swallow the antidote along with the poison_
To desire so much the end of your desiring?
[98]