We're going to do one more piece, and it's longer.
This is probably 20 minutes worth of stuff here--
just trigger warning.
It's called "Scavenger Loop."
And I want to say just a couple of things about it
so you can hear it, because it's quite a mess.
It's a big thing.
It's not a neat and tidy poem.
It's not a poem.
It's a sequence.
And I've tried to write something and not
edit everything out for a change,
and not to process anything or filter anything.
It's a poem about the death of my mother three years ago,
and it's a very simple poem.
Really, three things happen over the course of all of these ins
and outs.
The speaker of this poem starts in his front yard
on the day of a trash pickup and drives across the country,
through all the little towns and across the fields
to the hospital where she is, and is there
for weeks and weeks and weeks till the end,
and drives back home, and the poem ends up in the yard.
That's all.
It is a pastoral elegy in the old sense.
It is a complaint in the old sense.
It's called "Scavenger Loop" because I've
wanted to think about what we do as artists and writers
and musicians and lovers and citizens,
picking up the pieces of everything around us
and reusing it, recycling it over and over and over.
And if there's a bad guy in the poem--
there's got to be a bad guy--
it is probably the corporate world, the big world, the money
world, the world of big farming that contaminates our food
as it tries to plant more, as it puts chemicals into the ground.
That's the other part of the poem-- the complaint.
So there are pieces of poems in this,
there are things from Monsanto's pamphlets, there's Wikipedia,
there's things the doctor said in the hospital,
things my mother told me as she was dying,
just all folded into this one, without the distinction
of saying this belongs, this doesn't belong, this is pretty,
this isn't.
This is the whole thing.
"Scavenger Loop."
I guess I should find it.
You guys ready?
"Scavenger loop."
"'Buddy, can I dig?'
But he's already deep into it, pile I've dragged
all morning, piece by piece, to the curb.
He's a seasoned picker--
I can tell-- his CRV backed up right to the rubble
and hatchback propped open, half-full, at 9:00 AM,
of whatnots and what-ifs--
heirloom silver in a hand-tooled box, a baby's clothes,
books in bright wrappers.
He's come from a county away to score--
his term-- whatever he can the day before our village
'free-for-haul' is officially underway.
In the wild animals lie where they die, thus placing them
into the scavenger loop.
The upshot is that the highly concentrated animal nutrients
get spread over the land by the exodus of flies, beetles, et
cetera.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
(SINGING) You need to get home as soon as you can.
The doctor...
You need to get home as soon as you can.
The doctor thinks you should come back right now.
Dustscaewung, a kind of daydream of dust, a pondering of that
which has been lost--
dust-seeing, dust-chewing, dust-cheering.
The daydream of a mind strung between past and present.
Row on row of rich green stocks.
Something is coming more than we know how.
An hour ago, on Facebook, one newly friended friend
posted repeal Monsanto Protection Act,
as it deregulates the GMO industry
from any court oversight.
This status update was shared from a status update,
which picked it up from someone else's status update,
and so on.
77 people liked this post.
'A new record for me,' my new friend comments in the comment
box of her own status update--
a complex and mobile intimacy.
As in old woods, as when a single tree dies and starts
to rot--
yet it may remain for decades--
more than a third of the bird species
depend on standing dead trees, both for their food
and for nesting places.
The body decays, and the larva of some specialist beetles
process the wood for tiny tastes of nutritious starch inside.
Their burrows may be one to three millimeters wide,
spill a powdery sawdust as they chew--
powder [? pod, ?] deathwatch, tinder, polypore, sulfur shelf,
sap sucker.
The would returns to the soil as humus.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
(SINGING) [INAUDIBLE]
The USDA projected 2013 US corn production
at $14 billion bushels, based on the prospective planting
numbers of 97.3 million acres planted, 8% average abandonment
resulting in harvested area of 89.5 million acres,
average yield of 158 bushels an acre.
I am her son.
Sign here.
She is my mother.
'I am up to 100 likes, OMG.'
Apologizes to the doctor that she's dying.
Cessation of the furosemide loop diuretic.
Secession of O2.
That's a pacemaker, not a defib.
Who?
She sang yellow bird when she was happy.
One farmer is to 151 consumers.
Farm and ranch families are less than 2%
of the national population.
Her mysteries, her bells, her soaps, her coats.
Didn't this used to be Johnny Sinclair?
When I ask what she needed--
water, soup.
She said 7 Up.
She said tiramisu.
When we reduce biodiversity by breaking up
the forest for our backyards, we accidentally
free undiluted disease organisms to operate at full strength.
You may not be tired, but I'm tired.
Night sky, so vast.
Hear the wheat roar.
SmartStax RIB Complete-- a single bag refuge solution
against earworm, armyworm, row on hundreds
of rows of rich green stalks, knee-high by the 4th of July,
and 8 feet or more before the fall.
Monsanto offers corn farmers the ability
to control weeds and pests with a single seed
through a process known as trait stacking-- thus,
DroughtGard Hybrids, VT Triple PRO for above ground insect
protection stacked with below ground rootworm protection
and Roundup Ready 2 technology to fight Goss's wilt, gray leaf
spot, chronic drought, corn borer,
rummaging each other's trash heaps.
We deny that we are animals and part of the wheel of life,
part of the food chain.
We deny that we are part of the feast,
and seek to remove ourselves from it.
Even though we kill and consume animals by the billions
and permanently remove the life resources
for many more, but not one animal
is allowed to consume us even after we are dead,
not even the worms.
Give him some money.
Is it muddy there?
Is it?
4 up.
5 up.
6 up.
7 up-- 7 up?
Can we go now?
I want to go now, please, David.
Some money-- please, is it nice?
Is it money?
Is it some money?
Sweet, the--
[HUMMING]
Let's go today.
I want to go tomorrow, son--
today.
What can you see already from the chair?
Is it bubbles?
I like them.
Must-- can we go?
8 up, 9 up, 11 up, 12--
David, Philip, Dale, David, Philip, Dale.
Those are my men.
What can you see now?
Oh, grace.
The-- come on, come now.
Oh, no.
Why?
Is it muddy?
Honey-- awful.
Is it-- I'm not.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
'I'm just a picker,' he says.
'It's a hobby, not subsistence.
Least ways, not here abouts.'
Treasure hunter, geo-cacher, scrounge.
Skawage, middle English, as in customs.
As from escauwage, old North French, as an inspection.
As from scēawian, old English, to look at, or lately,
with some semantic drift.
English-- show.
Decomposers and detritovores complete the process
by consuming remains left by scavengers.
She was 15, maybe, riding her bike those long
evenings down old AA, where it all
turned blacktop and gravel past the Lindsay place,
farther than the quarry pool.
Evening fireflies about the soybeans, swallows in the air.
She was never in a hurry.
Once, in a little sprinkle, she pulled off the road.
And we saw, slung over her back wheel like saddle bags,
a cluster of plastic milk cartons
she used riding around to tweak her product.
A week later, her huffer chef boyfriend blew up their stove,
and him with it.
She didn't die, though her forehead melted,
and a few fingers fighting it off,
and her hair, part of one ear, top lip--
you know, lucky girl.
Row on row by the thousands of tall stalks growing so
straight they seem combed, every 20 rows a seed sign
to mark varietals of the lab's latest tests--
AgriGold 6267, AgriGold 6472.
Peck baskets lying the market sidewalk,
packed with local apples.
The sheriff's running more folks off for loitering
so the streets are quiet nights.
So much depends on what they tell you,
for your patronage or vote.
So much more, as malathion in the skin, on what they don't.
Come, kill the worm that doth its kernel eat, and strike thy
sparks within my tinderbox.
An average of nine different fungicides and pesticides
discovered in bee pollen are tied
to colony collapse disaster.
Who would I show it to?
--so unprocessed--
Her letter started years ago, leaving Evelyn's pie safe,
Waterford bells, grandmother's thimbles, her material.
How do you keep a thing you cannot touch?
AgriGold 6376.
Portrait of the boys above the table.
Denbeigh Acres, our manors have manners.
Four names, one crossed out--
heirlooms edited.
Quilts, towels.
Mother hand-stitched some linens, pillow cases,
FOPS tolerant.
Walk around and stick a yellow Post-It on the stuff you want,
is what he told me.
Nutcracker kitchen, cornbread from heaven, 14 China birds,
Publix, Cineplex, International Harvester, Archer Daniels
Midland, Tyson, Conagra, Swift.
The world gives you itself in fragments, in splinters.
The gray lawns cold where gold where quick gold mines.
Windbeat white bean, airy abeles set on flare.
Flake-doves sent floating forth at a farmyard scare.
Ah, well, it is all a purchase, all is a price.
The world gives you itself in fragments.
Splinter, noun--
A very small, sharp piece of wood, glass, metal, et
cetera, characteristically long and thin,
broken off from the main body.
Military firearms, gunnery, ordnance, and artillery--
a metal fragment from the container of a shell, bomb, et
cetera, thrown out during explosion.
Splinter group-- separate factions.
Sect, as of church, as of family.
Obscure-- secured by splint or splints.
Verb.
To reduce or be reduced to sharp fragments.
Shattered.
Break off in small shards.
Tell me, where does it hurt?
Everywhere else.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Broken shutters, musty box springs,
two ancient at eight years old laser printers, and all manner
of lawn mowers, power tools, hand tools,
shredded planters, to name only a bit of the stuff crammed
in my barn.
As for me, fewer loves, yet more amassed.
As there out behind the barn, the pile of waterlogged
lumber where the new fawns this spring were born,
and farther yet, between oak leaves, hydrangeas, and scrub
trees I've thinned out for cosmetic sake,
for fewer leaves to rake, for more sun, thick grass,
thus the complexity of the whole system diminished,
another positive feedback loop lost.
There beyond the village's big houses, there past the nail
parlors, the franchise hardware shop, the fast food shacks,
and tattoo sheds, beyond the strips, the burbs, there,
the sunken barns where, row on row,
the fields spread, running out through this old cemetery,
the country, the corn field, the soybeans for 10 miles,
100 more, for 1,000 miles of rich green stalks.
Removal of IV.
Pulse-- 16.
Pull.
Use the Poisson equation to describe the probability
distribution of random mutations in a cell that affect
a particular gene target.
Touch the eyelid closed with a damp finger.
P to the x equals h to the x times e to the negative h
over h factorial.
Playing Clue, counting her bean jars, pinging.
Rick's oaks died because they were all alike.
Chestnut blight, emerald ash borer, oak wilt,
Dutch Elm disease, laminated root rot, Aspen canker,
bacterial hardwoods.
The amount of fossil fuel required
to cremate the North American crop of bodies each year
has been estimated to equal what an automobile would
use in more than 80 round trips to the moon.
Good night, moon.
Good night ACE inhibitors.
Good night, to misquote myself, farmhouse fields.
Good night, noises everywhere.
Good night, corn.
One raven rearranging the meat.
I will do it.
Row on thousands of rows of yard sale goods.
Acres to let signs, falling down silos.
The genetic modifications are to enhance growth and durability.
The genetic modifications are to enhance growth
in corporate profits.
Here is your examination.
Choose one.
Kernel, cell, syllable.
I am her son.
Use the swab.
Sign here.
She is my mother.
[? Hamartia ?] poisons the soil to kill the worm that eats
the corn that grows in soil.
So what's the subject?
Water for the gums.
Meanwhile, the hay is air, and that calling pair of doves
farther apart than you might suppose,
flutes made of grasses, lower than her breath
until a jay cuts through that scold, that nag on a moment's
light, washing of breeze, get all the trees
blow and simmer, above which now many miles across the village,
the hot rods start up guttural again on the lit dusk track
to see in a few minutes, which one may cross over,
where they all set off.
Once together-- not now.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
(SINGING) Untie the knots of your knuckles forgetting--
A short ride in the van, then the eight of us
there in the heat.
White shirt sleeves sticking, the women's
gloves off, fanning our faces.
The workers had set up a big blue tent
to help us, at graveside, tolerate the sun, which
was brutal all afternoon, as if stationed above us,
though it edged limb to limb through two huge covering elms.
The long processional of neighbors,
friends, the town's elderly, her beauty shop familiars,
her club's notables.
The world is full of prayers, arrived at from afterwards,
he said.
Look up through the trees.
The leaves, curled there as if in self-control or quietly
hurting, or now open, flat-palmed, many fine-veined,
and whether from heat or sadness, waving.
Tell me your relation to pain, and I
will tell you who you are.
I am looking at trees.
They may be one of the things I will miss most from this Earth.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
(SINGING) You need to--
Get home--
As soon as you can.
The doctor thinks you should come back.
She is my-- cover her when she sleeps.
Under English Ivy, the Bishop's weed,
and its variegated soft sage blue and teal,
each plant a labyrinthine mass of roots.
So pulling up of one mandates the pulling now
of many, many yards long.
And under these, the pachysandra, folded, splayed
but uncovered, suddenly to spring upright,
the lace-like tendril ferns, the hard, starved for sun,
pale pathos of the hostas.
The yard beneath my yard, I find, as though
beneath the mind, another mind.
But trees do not dwell only in the present.
They remember the past, and they anticipate the future.
How trees remember, I do not know.
I have not been able to find out.
As under dogwoods, the ferns.
As under mounds of leaves and rank half-bales of straw,
a mass of hanging baskets trashed after our glad seasons.
And shards of terracotta pots, soft shoulder from weathering,
and under all of this, the reeking leaves and mulch
become rich loam again.
Like we let all, barrow by barrow,
to feed the acrid hard pan, where the hungry hollies,
the shallow-rooted lilies of the Valley try to grow.
I trowel it in.
I feed the Earth.
The Earth-- she is my mother.
Yes.
She is my mother.
Yes.
She is my mother.
[APPLAUSE]