So this is a poem I wrote for you.
It's called Doomstead Days, and I'm not
going to tell you ahead of time what a doomstead is,
if you don't know already.
It's a fascinating aspect of our contemporary culture,
and I'm also not-- this is a poem that includes everything
from my life and from the bioregion around Philadelphia.
I guess, just what I'll say a little bit of,
and you lived in Germantown, so you
know there's a really wonderful part of Fairmount Park called
the Wissahickon which is a really beautiful gorge
and creek.
And it is a tributary of the Schuylkill
which is also what sort of rounds most of Philly
and then goes into the Delaware which
sort of is on the other side of Philly
and they kind of converge in the south.
So it's a watershed poem, but there's a lot of other stuff.
And just factoid our state fish in Pennsylvania as the brook
trout.
Our state tree, the hemlock, eastern hemlock
which as you know, is under attack by the woolly adelgid.
So we've lost a great deal of our state tree.
Brook trout, endangered, because you need
hemlocks to shade the creeks where they breed
to keep the water cold enough.
And you also need clean, non-silty, no coal silt,
for instance, no mining effluent in the water.
We have a hard time with that in Pennsylvania.
So it was funny.
I was doing all this research into-- this is like my,
'I live in Pennsylvania now, I can just admit it' poem.
And as I did all this research, I was like,
every single state, anything, it's like the worst thing
to get elected to any state anything
in Pennsylvania, because you will be endangered immediately.
The ruffed grouse, there's no habitat left.
It's like sad, our sad, sad, fucked up state.
But pretty representative of the Anthropocene, I have to say.
It was a good wake up call.
So anyways, Doomstead Days.
You'll notice it's a very different poem which
makes me happy.
Doomstead Days.
Today's gender is rain.
It touches everything with its little silver epistemology,
modeled like a brook trout, with 100 spots
wide as bark scars on this slim trunk,
thrust up from one sidewalk square.
The four square feet of open ground
given a straight tree twiggy perimeter continually clipped
by parking or car door or passing trash truck
that snaps an actual branch.
I find haunting the little plot, its winged
achenes auto rotate down to.
It's not that I don't like a wide sidewalk or the 45
bus that grinds right by.
But if organisms didn't insist on forms of resistance,
they'd be dead of anthropocentric
technomechanical systems whose grids restrict the living,
through perpetual stress that elicits
intense physical response.
Like panic hitting the psoas with cramps, or root fungus
sunken in maples allotment of city property.
As tolerably wide as the migraine that
begins at the base of my skull and pinches with breadth
calipers my temples, until the feel of flay
arrays the dura's surface.
Inside the bones, inside the head,
the healer holds in her hands and says
the occiput is shut, flat, and irks
the nerves that thread through its unappeasable shunt
into the spine.
I see a white light.
I keep thinking about the way long drought dries out topsoil
so deep beneath its surface, the first hard rain
wreaks flood, taking the good dirt with it.
The way today's wet excess escapes its four square feet
of the exposed root and rivers out, a flex of sediment
alluvial over the civic cement of the Anthropocene
in currents.
A supple, rippled, velvet dun as Wissahickon Creek
in fall's brief season of red and spawn.
When brook trout in chill quick shallows
once dug into gravel to let nested eggs
mix with milt and turn pearls.
Translucent as raw, unpolished quartz, each white-eyed ova
flawed by a black fleck.
My eyes close over at the height of migraine.
Fertile error waiting with incipient tail,
ready to propel it deeper into nausea.
Until the healer halts its hatching and calms neuralgia
between the heels of her hands, pressing the occiput back open
into the natural curve the bones forget.
The way the banks of the Wissahickon
have forgotten rapids rinsing schist shaded by hemlock
that kept the brook trout cold.
Each patterned aspect of habitat lost first
to dams and mills and industry runoff and plots of flax.
Germantown planted for paper and cloth made with water's power
and hauled out of the precipitous gorge
up rough narrow roads south to the city port.
Before adelgids took the crucial dark
from under hemlocks sun heating the rocky creek down
steep rills to the lower Schuylkill.
Wide in its final miles dammed at Fairmount
for two centuries of coal silt and dredge, fabric dying
and sewage, that gave rise to typhus
and refinery spills that gave rise to fire.
Rinsed by this gender that remembers current's circuit
anadromous shad and striped bass leaving the Atlantic,
heading up river, shedding salt water
for fresh in runs whose numbers turned the Green River silver.
If color counts as epistemology, spring sun
on the backs of 1,000 shad is a form of knowing.
Local to another century and the duller color of ours
is the way the word gender remembers.
It once meant to fuck, beget, or give birth, sibling,
to generate, and engender.
All fertile at the root and continuous as falling water,
molecules smoothing the sparkling gnarl of Wissahickon
schist until its surface mirrors their force.
The fuel element and fundament alike derive thriving from,
being at its biggest, when its kinetic energy headed
toward intensity.
Everything's body connected by this totally elastic
materiality.
I feel as ecstatic, wide dilation, when the shut skull
gives up resistance to the healer's hands,
and the occiput opens its bones.
My mind's eye goes, OK, I'm awake now, rowdy with trout,
psoas relaxed.
My body's a conduit.
It roars with water, passing from past to present through.
Pipes and riparian ecotones like,
all of my fluids pollutants cycling back
into my own watershed.
Toxins and heavy metals bonded to blood,
stored in liver and fat, C8 glyphosate, mercury, and lead.
It's awkward.
OK?
I keep thinking about the man who
asked me to visit his doomstead, which seems kinky
for a first date.
What's the safe word for men with genders
built for the worlds end?
Men with weaponized genders, hoarding solar power
and canned goods, bottled water.
Genders tending small vegetable gardens out back,
behind the chickens.
Concrete genders sealed in lead, their doors secured from inside
with thick steel bars.
Fringe libertarian end times genders, hetero, girly, camo,
gun calendars, apocalyptic tits pinned on brick walls,
by a lone bunk, so the men can cross out each day once.
Civil society ends with a pathetic snivel
like, please help.
Doomstead men live doomstead days already sealed
in extreme fiction.
As if there were ever a way to stay safely self-contained,
by which I mean the Anthropocene is its own gender biospheric
in scale.
Its persistent flux from fossil record to an arctic ice core,
so uncontainable we all exhibit it
with a local sense of personal chosen expression,
strategic or contingent.
Like fertility, medicalized, tracked,
managed, or casual, happy fucking without a condom,
risky given the odd, leverage against us,
and the blameless microbes seeking
homes in our nooks and tubes.
So I don't visit his doomstead, a psychic structure
I feel in my head as blocked thought I watch play out
in the Schuylkill where pools wide shallow
with silt above Fairmount Dam.
I stand on the bank.
I know I'm not supposed to posit an analogy between the river
and my body, but courtesy of this dam, the city
siphons its water into me.
So we're related on a molecular level,
so intimate I think I can say it wants
speed and movement, free enough to jump dumb impediment.
We ask water to hold itself in strained relation
to human needs without relief.
Without the hands that hold my bones and tend my fascia
that remember a different posture
without blockage or pain.
A model for undoing harm done by capital
empowered to frack during record drought, awful for aquifers.
Millions of gallons of toxic waste water injected into Earth
or kept in open ponds, prone and porous in Western counties.
Where river otters have rebounded after last being
spotted in the Allegheny in 1899.
Otters are raucous, and chirp, chitter,
chuckle, and grumble when wrestling together or sliding
on ice.
Playful biophany rivers have missed for a whole century,
like brook trout rooting in loose, cool gravel or the plash
of insects falling from hemlocks.
The intact eastern riverine biome,
one serious mess of sound enmeshed in sound
enmeshed in biotic patterns.
As heavy as traffic when the weekend weather is nice,
and I ride the early 27 bus to the Wissahickon.
It's not that I don't like the city.
It's just if biodiversity is the measure of health,
the city is by definition sick with people
and built structures crowding out other lives.
Though I love signs, species persist.
This sidewalk moss, probably Bryum argentum,
native to guano-covered seabird rookeries.
This female ginko stinking up the street
with stone fruits crushed underfoot.
This nameless fern in a downpipe drain, so modest in scale,
like the simple songs of house sparrows everywhere though.
This chubby one is hustling a fallen everything
bagel of seeds and crumbs.
And it's not that I don't like people either,
our sociality, genitals, and smells,
interesting diction, surprising privacies
revealed at parties, bars, and in bedrooms.
Our genders in acts various and wet,
as thought product of dissolved salts,
washing our brains in rich cognition
that falters without water which can't
be taken by the head in the hands and held in the hopes
of healing.
Its body is too vast.
Its mind boundless.
By definition, the world is awake.
Be careful, my dears, it is the gender
that remembers everything.