Margaret Konkol
Unnamed Interference, Colonized Spring
In the past twenty years an estimated 5.5 million tons of sand have been mined on Maui. Replacement sand mitigates the constant erosion of Maui’s strong ocean currents. Officials estimate that within the next five to seven years the great white beaches of Maui will be an entirely global import. Imported sand, the beautiful silica of Queensland, Australia, has quickly become the chief source for Maui’s famous beaches.
7:44 a.m., March 20th 2009 marked the first day of Spring in Buffalo, NY. This was eight minutes earlier than in 2008. By 2019 Spring will arrive 2.3 days ahead of schedule. Compared with the past decade, a North American plant will bud 1.2 days earlier and European plants will bud 1.4 to 3.1 days earlier. The Independent reported that during the first five years of the 1980s, daffodils opened in Kew Gardens around the 12th of February. By the 2000s, the first blooms appeared as early as 27th of January. The dates are verified by Kew Science. Horticulturalists interviewed for this piece noted that ten years ago this would have been mid-winter. This nature interest-piece ran on January 31, 2008.
March 20th or the vernal equinox, indicates the location of the earth tilting on its axis in zero relation to the sun. This astrological measure has corresponded with meteorological patterns, indicating for the northern hemisphere, the onset of spring. In the intervening years since 2009, I recorded the first appearance of a daffodil bloom in the front yard of the house on Norwood Avenue; in Buffalo, NY in which I rented an apartment, the meteorological and astrological relationship has grown increasingly erratic. The US National Phenology Network, which is “taking the pulse of our planet,” tabulates publicly-sourced data on bloom patterns, and plant and animal sightings. These publicly accessible data sets, compiled and submitted by amateurs and enthusiasts, read as elegiac poems of enumeration. I like Ursula Heise’s call to recognize the database as the new epic. Whereas Wordsworth invoked daffodils as pure plural––as a crowd, beyond precise quantification, numerous and alike, over which the lyric “I” in its singularity could pass, to me, what is fundamental to poetry is repetition and quantity. What is crowded, seemingly indecipherable occurrences, holds the weight of the present. We cannot afford not to stagger with its burden. My lyric “I” is an environmental condition, which is bound to historical narrative. This history of crowds, this crowded history is personal. Wordsworth was right about looking to the clouds. History floats like microplastic and sinks like bric-a-brac and returns to us–– legible in global data. History, memory and data weave together. I have tried to tell the story of my own childhood through my memories of growing up between two continents, Australia and North America, and of coming of age in an uncertain climate. Story as spatial awareness, rather than narrative, and dispersal, rather than linear documentation––are the means that I have chosen. This is a lyric about convoluted senses of empire, of the late twentieth-century, and the global flows of capital, raw materials, and the repetition of erosion to which they belong. Old cycles of dependency tilt out of sync. Winter moths hatch before their food source has leafed.
The images below include family photographs and satellite images of the progress of ice cover over Lake Erie during winter 2009. These were gathered from the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory.
“In 2002 coral reef researchers warned that ‘projected increases in CO2 and temperature over the next fifty years will exceed the conditions under which coral reefs have flourished for the past half-million years. In October 2002 researchers convened in Townsville, Queensland to discuss the future of the Great Barrier Reef. According to reef scientists, a further rise of 1C (1.8F) in global temperature would see 82 percent of the reef bleached; a 2C (3.6F) increase 97 percent, and a 3C (5.4F) “total devastation.” Tim Flannery, The Weather Makers (2005)
Book I.
That the Hawaii of white sand beaches
has been made not found
by boatload bound for a stone-ledged island
losing itself each year in a wide sea
Out of Queensland steel containers
load these funnel boats
fill from ocean leavings
whitest beaches in the world Australia
that raw material is taken Australia
from pearl fishers in colony England for want of wool
warm against the biting damp
we have lost or left now
hot showers
in a warming world
which is all so beautiful
which is all so beautiful.
And nature which we took
has not proved the constant
we believed it
II.
Beautiful as cataloged use
the idea is lost in unnumbered past
this human time: precise species
with its love and compass dials in mother-of-pearl
by terrestrial movement
in these “elements of paradise”
through a sea green mile
arrivals eyes elevated search inland
burned in strong air
currents by
gulf stream as guide in this aerial ocean
for steel ships
to trade
in land not wool where
worthless in its excess
of long and lovely sunsets
wind fields of amber dust
above
ragged dug-throw torn-down land
in spring
so colonized
as it is in all latitudes
will arrive
as empire in no need of history
Warm days mild nights
poleward four miles
maple pine and hardwood forests in retreat
sugarbush frigid nights
wants warm days
its smokebush
brilliant
bloom this spring
a yearly advance in our human time
a measure
of difference
our warming world which is also beautiful
also beautiful
and the name of it.
III.
That there is
an unnamed interference
and has never been
for any living one of us
a symmetry too complex
as of webs of reefs great ocean forests
gorging
on the wealth
of a hotter ocean
softening in a
world on fire
bleaching bone white
a coral below
now bare as winter
as what
will break
down become Australia within and without for purchase
sand and weighted measures of it Australia within and without to purchase
what will stand in its place if
a refusal, out of refuse, accumulates
as once spinifex
water form
in new clouds
these ribbed whales white against
iodine sand
pulling away
from the shape
of a land
as one island to another
of every living thing,
gives
new and stronger seas
to break what the pylons keep
fish with eyes of lead
poison in those pretty fins
a true horizon
as productive difference
everlasting unraveling
in cities of gold and lead
story of a world we will yet make and lose
feel the weight of this celestial attraction
as the crocus pushes out in April
will not wait for May
Winter moth too soon to hatch
wants bitter oak should not wait
hungry now in February
Oysters weak and without shells
paddling backward
in a trackless ocean
unraveling
this pattern of our disappearance:
to write this
in chalk
to right
a history of calcium carbonate
out of ancient ocean logjams
what is fragile
is early pull
this beautiful world
the drawing
from the wall.
Margaret Konkol lives in Norfolk, Virginia. Her work has appeared in Little Red Leaves, Damn the Caesars, and PQUEUE.