So this is the last Johnson, Vermont poem,
which probably feels weird to be bringing this bioregion to all
of you who are like, pine trees.
So this is called Granite, Olivine, Quartz, Carnelian.
On foot under thunder heading in from the west,
I wasn't thinking rain.
But now I'm thinking rain on Plot Road where it crosses Foot
Brook doing its thaw thing--
ropy, cold, clear water pulling itself downhill fast,
spatter and foam lathering granite banks.
Uphill, up the road, a field mown flat gold.
Its curves cut by horizon, a veil of rain drawing across it
slowly so it darkens in increments.
It's cold.
I have neither poncho nor umbrella.
The good news is the way Archimedes sought a place
to stand to lift the world and Descartes wanted just one
thought, as certain and indubitable as the point
a lever turns into a fulcrum, this dirt road
is as good a place as any to stand in the poem
and get soaked.
The bad news is El Niño.
It's a bummer to go all cogito here
after the hottest winter and the hottest year so far on record.
All the thaw finished by the first week of March.
And yet I can feel the poem gather inside me
a color, the dry silver, brown inside an empty milkweed pod.
Everything outside it on a spectrum of saturation,
wet and getting wetter.
As the front moves in overhead, a little mist
sizzling on the canopy.
Its sound in the middle distance between brook and thunder,
a distance rusty blackbirds fill also
from a tree they flock to, raucous and dominating
the crown.
When the rain hits, they fall silent.
Then there's nothing but thunder in the hushed woods, and water,
on water, on water.
Above the sky, a sort of crushed lilac.
Around me, clay hill, an issue of trickles gathering gravity,
gathering mass, heading down to the valley.
Little streams, even, under my feet.
I want to say I can feel the pull
on my vertebrae, occiput to sacrum,
all the water in my bones longing to join the thaw.
And thought, too, alluvial.
The way valleys slowly fill with gravel the surrounding
mountains send down.
Granite, olivine, quartz, Carnellian,
each stone a distinct idea washed, then carried by rain.
Down the steep embankment, I walk to sit on the ground
and watch Foot Brook go by at south by southwest.
I like how walk and watch almost rhyme the way,
done simultaneously, one fits inside the other until it
doesn't.
I trip or stop my body, so my mind
gets quiet at the point of slippage and lets vision in.
Over its rocky bed, the water runs clear,
leaving the distortions and torsion
makes flickering the way musculature moves
skin, all flexure and shadow.
Don't move is what the X-ray tech told me.
So I stood and did what I'm doing now.
I watched the living turned to image,
a sort of bluish fluid on a white screen the doctor lit up.
I still have some cartilage left,
but I could have looked at my feet for hours like that.
Molecules locked, integrating matrices
where the joints meet their calcified spurs turned pretty
and affix any stripped of flesh.
It's weird to be always incurring
injuries I have to live with.
The process makes a space in thinking
like the space I make on the brook's hard bank.
Anthropogenic non-point source pollutant, even my piss,
an effluent of medicines and pesticides,
a pharmacopoeia of harm for riverine species.
I close my eyes.
Rain on leaf litter sounds like storm wind in the canopy
and the brook throwing itself downhill,
a consonance that makes the world briefly coalesce,
comfortingly self-same, endlessly rhymed with itself.
Cogito makes it seem, it's only missing my ears to make it so.
I opened my eyes, I get up and go east,
back up Plot Road muddy now with runoff.
Off-road, the landscape ranges from forest
to field to dwelling and back, rhythm of settlement
and regrowth, logging, and aftermath.
My eye always drawn to ecotone, what looks like ugly rupture
and is richly liminal.
I love what grows in thickets.
Thistles there and milkweed, and seed heads,
and hundreds that luster against the denser screen of trees.
I love how sparrow-sized birds forage scrub,
breaking cover to return to forest.
The black cap chickadee loosing it slow two-note sing song,
sing song, only after it lands a branch.
I love how some things must be listened into appearance.
Thistles rustle, sigh into sight.
Where the poem starts first as a color,
I can hear stiff, dry stalks silver, gray, and brown.
So I watch and walk on, pockets full of hollow pods, a few
still stuffed with floss.
It's almost pornographic, the detail
the world offers in excess, a texture whose totality is
beyond adequate, capture and excites anyway,
endless as the filaments of lichen, the same bright green
of olivine.
It's almost as if by walking, I can
forget the harm that happens where my flesh meets the world.
It's almost as if by watching, I could
undo the human subject I'd become and remain
through undoing done to others.
Between walk and watch, the whole world
slips, going missing, my empty mind
empty as the chambers of a gun whose six bullets have already
hit the intended targets.
Residual heat and soft powder all that cogito leaves behind.
I never meant to fire.
It's not my voice crying, "Bull's eye,"
but I find my mouth moves too without thinking
as the species go down.
And then I do nothing but think, for instance,
of a cave in upstate New York, spelunker's boots introduce
there a fungus that plunders hibernacula until they're empty
of bats.
The disease inducing an inability
to hibernate in winter.
Mortality accruing roost to roost across 29 states
after a decade of infection.
It's all bad news.
It's the point the lever turns to a fulcrum.
Human life meeting the lives that
surround it are wounding the world that lifts us up.
And I keep walking the way enthusiasm at root
means the fact of being possessed by some god.
I don't know how else to know what I know,
but to put it on foot.
A gesture as outwardly useless as boots
in a downpour on a scale this total.
Just before Plot Road meets Clay Hill,
an abandoned barn leans into air where a stream cuts
under its right back corner.
Its floor strewn still with tools and hay,
license plates adorning its aged gray facade.
I like the look of it, the way on Clay Hill
I like the sound of passing cars harped by frost
heaves that rattle their chassis.
Laughable enchantment, the sort of ruin that seems livable
until it isn't.