Dan Eltringham

From Off/Set

Hating traveling & explorers insufficiently to offset

the burning of being

here, where one longs to be all

                                                the

                                                same

not the same as all staying in in in-difference,

setting off the sentence loosed out from itself

or firecrackers in the street

caught, yes once again, in yet another eddy

                                    breathstop in becoming’s

onward 8-ball rush,

in at the net,

hawkeye lies

& back to the baseline calculations

history translated to the time of the life of a tree

calculated as the precise antithesis of a certain calculable part

of Cambo, of Whitehaven, cleanly syllogisms stagger equivalence,

like for not-like somehow alike.

Thinking of it, the appetite & aftervoid right through

its density & pressure,

living & dying in alter

nation but burning their way to the end:

ineluctable returning to start; lost & damaged,

deepening futures at closing speed & shunted sideways,

a pine out of place: knee-jerk translation to a greater scale

(of abstraction)

putting it plainly at last

offset plantations razed right through

at one credit per tonne

mapping differences of deferral,

of demurral, we should say, differences of how we differently

disavow but all at once come to see the necromass spun into soil

a whole other displacement surfacing the imago

(mycorrhizal supply lines)

no-one asked the fungi if they wanted this

but they’ve been reading us for millennia

wrapt & wrought through skin & cell

and the lucky ones, spinning out our thought.

These pending processes,

death is slow, time is short

by close of play today i want to see

vascular veins laid open & the oil leaching out

the money hill unmounted still

                        Varoufakis was undressing

the global economy with his eyes,

remember,

was that a meme or before

            losses cut down the coast

(burn it all down)

crack open the methane lattice

sit back & wait for the feedback to kick

or hold your ear to the pulsing syncopation

of a storm drain in spate:

sea & ice

ice & ocean

dialectical counterpoint

call & answer song

read by measure, watch the levels

            as fossils agitate in the lobby      

assets stranded attest Deepwater

attest Gorgon

attest Sunrise

over bitumen horizontal tarlands

keep turning

frack me sideways / this is not a test

red wines for red meat stupid

peak time passed silt liquefaction limits

ongoing full-price fares extinctive this city on stilts

i want to see

the layers of money inherent in the land 

at least then we’d know where to start.

Andrea Carter Brown 

In Praise of Natural Disaster 

I

1993

Tops of trees on a sea of gray, white

houses up to second-story windows

in water. sinuous ribbon of river

bed, bank, levee, berm overrun

by rains they can't contain.

Each morning we hungrily comb Times

and Tribune for the latest installment

in this summer's soap opera. The sheer

scale is hard to absorb. Six inches in

one hour, tens of thousands of square

miles, millions of dollars, a sixth

Great Lake spawned over the Gopher,

Coyote. Jayhawk, Hawkeye, Cornhusker

and Show Me! states, countless dead cows,

hogs and snakes, and to date, forty-three

humans. Returning to sodden homes,

veterans claim the stench exceeds wartime

memory. El Niño, Raccoon, Prairie

du Rocher, Bermuda High. We are launched

on a crash course in geography,  geology,

and the pseudo-science, meteorology.

Throw in Saints Joseph, Genevieve,

and Louis, left behind by the French missionaries

who first wrested this land by faith. Tack on

Manifest Destiny, civil engineering, fluid

mechanics, agribusiness. Vice-

and then the President visit, promise more

than they can afford; scores of porta-potties

fly in and ten thousand pounds

of dog food from Ohio. Addicted,

I cannot get enough and, in my heart

of hearts, want the worst to come, be it

Ol' Man River stranding the meander

he once created or a city left high and dry,

deprived of its lifeblood. We see signs

all around us the world is not

as it was, but our own lives seem

to slip away without amounting to much

and we spend our days muddling

through, our struggles looming large

because they are ours. So there's nothing

like a good forest fire, earthquake

or flood to cut us back down

to size. Which is why I envy

that mud-splattered woman sprawled

against sandbags. For weeks she's fought

night and day to keep the river at bay,

but at her feet we can see the current

bubble up, eating under what it could not

bust through. How lucky she is, how blessed

her exhausted slumber. When she wakes,

her world will have changed

and all of us, with it.

II

2023

Three decades later, reading

those last four lines, I wonder

how could I have been so cavalier?

Floods, fires, tornados, earthquakes

have become so common; flags fly at half-mast

every day: we're never sure which disaster

is to blame. Constant war; floods

of immigrants; schools, houses

of worship, clubs, parks no longer

safe. Images of destruction

fill our minds. Polar vortex,

heat dome, global warming, climate change,

live shooter drill, live shooter . . .

new terms enter our vocabulary.

Disaster once seemed unusual,

beyond our control,

something that happens

to us, the way the French

called their loss to Germany in 1940

un désastre or le débâcle.

Translation not needed.

Now we understand we have

ourselves to blame. These days

I look back on the woman who wrote

"How lucky she is, how blessed

her exhausted slumber" longingly.

If only we could rebuild our lives

trusting the world to behave

as it always had, extreme

weather events rare, or seldom.

Last spring I stood

on the banks of the Mississippi

where it had flooded in 1993.

"The Great Flood" it was called

at the time, for it hadn't happened

within human memory. Push and pull

of tugs and barges. Reconstructed

locks and dams contain the mighty stream

so sleepy river towns like Dubuque

and Joplin, the birthplace of Mark Twain,

leveled by a tornado since that flood,

can be, busy with the ebb and flow of life.

Where is that nameless woman

whose efforts moved me so long ago?

Did she rebuild in place? Move further

inland? Up on the bluffs? Leave

the area entirely for a new life?

On the Battery

In a scant hour, the shade retreats

across macadam and sunlight strikes

the silver-bottomed Crimean linden

leaves uplifted by a lazy midday breeze.

With stout trunks of scarred bark

and heart-shaped serrated greens

cascading toward the ground, they thrive

on this man-made wind-swept walk where

salt invades fresh and a polished pink sea

wall ten feet tall thinks it will protect

the land from ocean's onslaught. I see this

from above, watching the sky cloud up

and brightness fade. Yesterday it rained

hard all day, and the day before, and late

today they promise more. Storm sewers

back up, overflow. A rat squashed

by a tire straddles, spread-eagled,

the still damp blacktop; the run-off,

opaque with mud and grime. Will

the river ever again be clear, clean?