BOMB CYCLONE

A Journal of Ecopoetics

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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.

For further study, see Journal of Coastal Research. Volume 23, Issue 1: pp. 87 – 105. “The Predictive Accuracy of Shoreline Change Rate Methods and Alongshore Beach Variation on Maui, Hawaii.” Ayesha S. Genz, Charles H. Fletcher, Robert A. Dunn, L. Neil Frazer, and John J. Rooney. https://doi.org/10.2112/05-0521.1.

 
 
 
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.

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