Snowball Earth
At night/I came down/from the mountains
a woman/led me/to her hut
we sang/as rain fell/among trees
Champerret and Terry, The Lascaux Notebooks
Earth is returning to the conditions that have dominated it for the last three million years: a regime of ice.
Come with us to the future of the Earth, a world that echoes our prehistoric past.
Ward and Brownlee, The Life and Death of Planet Earth
From whose womb did the ice come forth,
and who has given birth to the frost of heaven?
Job 38:29
We are stardust, we are golden
We are billion-year-old carbon
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden
Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young
We are all made of stars.
Moby/Richard Hall
Fireflies
They are the stars of the universe that can be seen on earth.
Every lit-up bug is a comet, passing through an Oort cloud
and heading straight for the lake of no return. They tumble
and swivel after dark and our children try to catch them. As
lanterns, they are the light of knowledge we can’t otherwise
quite fathom, but begin to see below in the bioluminescence
on the seabed of the ocean that’s flaring in front of our eyes.
In Forest Park
Boys set out early with a wagon full of garden tools,
bug nets, brooms, a plastic mower and a crow cage.
We pass at a cattail marsh, a community water well:
I’m fixing a flat, the two say they’re after dinosaurs,
they want to go back in time. Can we catch a mylodon?
five-year-old Kai pipes up, and Eddie, seven, nods
his head but hesitates, not too sure if it’s a mammal.
Down in that borrow pit, he says, may be its cave or lair.
The boys press on, the sun brightens up a pasture
pocked with long-haired cows, violets going gold.
A life of contemplation, love’s labors never lost,
finally, an end to any notion that the world is flat.
Maybe all that’s important has already happened,
any notion of progress is a sham, but nonetheless
we see our future in the corners of a spider web.
Tire patched, I bicycle down to the bridge to see
if any bass patrol the shoals, as the tide subsides
and a harbor tug pushes an oil barge up the river.
In our upstate Forest Park, a harvest moon is up,
there are foxes by the pond, a lone coyote barks
and up above, in seas of stars, we spy the Pleiades.
Warm Mineral Springs
There wasn’t a Panama land bridge a week before:
a wandering ground sloth dips a paw in crab grass,
then lurches and lumbers over. Her kin came next,
browsing, wading, swimming up the Myakka River,
where last week we saw hundreds of gleaming eyes
of alligators in the moonlight, here where Ponce de
Leon found his fountain of youth, where we bush-
whacked into pitch pine and palmetto. Eremotherium
eomigrans, mother to us all, grazing giant dandelions
and nose-diving for underwater kelp, sitting upright
now to cast her eyes out across the Gulf of Mexico,
sniffing for camels, shrub-ox, three-ton armadillos,
cave-ice bears, saber-tooth tigers, while Paleo-kids
have carved up an Irish elk for their evening’s meal.
Cruger Island
Kingfishers dive into spatterdock at Tivoli North Bay,
just like Argentavis, from lands before we knew what
time was, by a long reach of river at high tide, where
you can walk to conch shell mounds in wading boots,
cross railroad beds to vanish into Cruger Island. Once
home to neo-Gothic idylls for the rich, here, in thick
moss understory, poison ivy climbs up chestnut trees.
On the banks of the Mahicantuck, where Maya ruins
plundered in Uxmal once graced the bay for evening
boating parties, beavers now have a run of the place.
It’s stone quiet as I creep like a wasp into hackberry.
I swear I see the shadow of a bear, but he’s not keen
to meet me. All at once, on a spiky honeysuckle path,
the bird buff mucks up past me in gaiters with a grin.
The Ellipse
The Milky Way is a spiral, our driveway is as oval
as an avocado, lemon, a mirror or a hippodrome
and poems are indirect, meandering, like how we
leave out words to un-say things with an ellipsis,
a placeholder for fitful thoughts, a lunar tidal pull
creating waves in outer space that surge or ebb
in utterance, an awareness of the self, as sounds
stir cirrus clouds above the old-growth hemlocks,
a magical singing bush, paleo-magnolias in bloom
as a train to Montreal booms by. We cross a field
of nettles to walk by the ellipse, a reflecting pool
one day’s drive from the one in Washington D.C.
where once we portaged a Caribbean Buoy into
a sea of protesters, bent on ending guerrilla wars
in El Salvador and Nicaragua. Now, a year ago
on January Sixth, a mob stormed up the Capitol
to thwart our fair elections. That’s speech gone
sour, bashed, spoiled, stained like crushed trucks
in a car graveyard. The Ellipse was dark that day,
our national mood was a tornado, like my words
a storm of comets flashing as they near the Earth.
The World’s First Trees
Into the Catskill Mountains, up to Utsayantha Lake, we
come in cars, on foot, by bike, on skis, ATVs, passing
by Cairo, Kaaterskill, we cruise under corridors of jets
that streak towards Finland and the Arctic, till we reach
Schoharie Reservoir, watch as falling leaves turn umber.
In Gilboa, we stop for lunch at a forest turned to stone,
from when the planet was one continent, four hundred
million years ago, when palms loomed over straggler fish
that slunk up from the sea, before the burst of flowering,
our hundreds and thousands of kinds of buds that bloom,
with bats and moths as pollinators. We swim near rocks
on an ancient shore of the Devonian, by fossil ferns from
when we were lungfish, sucking in our earliest gasps of air,
as we smile and celebrate the trees that brought us oxygen.
Hyde Park Mastodon
A kettle pond reminds us of a glacier in a valley
where sinkholes unmask mastodons. Up 9G to
Haviland Road, we search for a farmhouse dig
site, wondering what the ‘G’ stands for, maybe
green or gray or a goat on the grassland steppes.
We find remnants of a tarry pit, turtles basking
in summer haze. We do a day trip up to Ithaca,
the Museum of the Earth, to visit the Hyde Park
skeleton. A six-year-old shouts joyfully, twirling
with gelati on her face. She’s got a How to Draw
a Mammoth paperback in hand, while college kids
are delicately dusting fossils in troughs of bones,
proto-archaeologists from Oswego. We snack on
peanuts in the shell and walk beside Cayuga Lake,
dreaming of schemes to restore these creatures to
Wrangel Island and to hereabouts, where we know
they’ll prosper, go on from where we went wrong.
Eohippus
We walk in a fern-wood forest where Eurasian boars
might root for acorns in fields of climbing snow pea.
Corn rows reach beyond a puppet-making commune
some call Rokeby, where wan and ghostly Percherons,
two draft horses from the Revolutionary War, are put
to pasture after years of service, oblivious to mayflies,
a picture of us, chomping on plums in years to come.
It’s as cold and dank a day as one back in the Eocene,
when mini ponies munched on strangler figs, creeks
filled up with burning ash. Buzzards eye an eohippus
with unease, as they take to wing in monster flocks by
the seacoast, darkening the skies above Quintana Roo.
Pint-sized mares canter across the southern pole, with
horseshoe crabs, flying cockroaches, a just discovered
scaly tuatara lizard who’s been here since the Triassic,
all that’s left of the lake-bed world of the earliest horse.
Atlantic Sturgeon
Into vast Lake Albany, advancing glaciers shear off shale,
pushing south into Roundout Creek, surging in slack-tide
spills, as we cruise by sunken wrecks on a solar powered
boat, a floating classroom. After Esopus Wars, herds of
Dutch cattle crash into wheat fields, a Mohican nation
disappearing in the river ever more polluted, near where
toothless bottom feeders swim, ruling inlets from below.
Vessels haul gypsum, gravel, bricks, molasses, diesel, flax,
timber, malt, blocks of ice, tool and die or sewage sludge.
Cementon rose up at Germantown for mixing concrete,
sending it down to the city. Canals shunt coal from mines
in Pennsylvania to Roundout’s tugs where whiskered fish
hold sway in sunken thoroughfares, where the winter sun
seeps down through tanker hulls to the hardy ancient few.
Avocados
In the future, I slowly wander near a sandstone quarry
full of aspens, where giant bears are dozing in the sun.
I think I see glyptodons, big as VW Beetles, pressing
down on me by the Sawkill River. Spotted skunks are
prowling everywhere with avocados as far as I can see.
Up the hill, spikes on locusts trees keep nibblers away.
Today, though, in a Queens Cafe, we eat avocado toast
for brunch, consider the girth and aspect of one green
and pimply specimen that has a certain uselessness to it,
as not a single animal can ingest its seed and pass it out.
Once upon a time, mastodons, gomphotheres, might’ve
enjoyed its pasty flesh that goes best with butter or salt.
We sip coffee milk from the hills of Guatemala, imagine
a herd of megafauna browsing in the wild for avocados.
American Museum of Natural History
The day after Christmas, I’m dreaming of a nest of pterodactyls
after reading The Lost World, set on a tropical mesa-top in a time
before history had canoes, pelts, diaries or scribes to jot it down.
A class of second graders is daubing with pastels, a marble floor
in the Hall of Dinosaurs looking like the primordial soup of life.
A teacher’s trying to stave off pandemonium, chatting up liftoff
of the James Webb telescope, shot a million miles towards Mars.
He calls out planet names: Arion, Kepler, MOA, Ogle, Pollux,
out beyond the birth of carbon stars, sink holes, pots and pans.
In a hundred million years it’s likely an asteroid will glance off
the equator, smash us to smithereens. Heat death, big freeze,
cataclysmic continental drift or ice, calving into seas. But for
now, the kids will master snowboards, solve equations, commit
their lives to learn of a world that’s wiping out its birds and bees.
Flowers and Coffee
We sit in Flowers and Coffee, near the United Nations,
as New Year’s revelers take back Second Avenue, lovers
strolling in Tudor City Park. How many climate talks do
we need to curb our carbon intake? A world’s gone dark
with money, government and guns. My Burmese friends
arrive to share with us a sherry, gazing at U-Thant Island,
just next to the Knotted Gun, as war drags on in Yemen.
Dinosaur Frankie roams halls of the General Assembly,
roses bloom in a winter garden, a neon Pepsi-Cola sign
across the river reddens as the sun sets. It’s nice enough
for a weekend in New York, where we came to un-learn
what we knew, with gigs at CBGB’s or St Mark’s. Poets,
priests, chimney sweeps outside the Blue & Gold tavern
with a song for a turning of the year: what cheer! what cheer!
Beautiful Armadillo
I’ve packed a paleo picnic to eat at the Serpent Mound
in Chillicothe, where we dare to harvest native chicory
on a woolly rhino footpath. We dine on grass-fed beef,
roast chestnuts, cauliflower chimichurri, pitcher plants
and table grapes, with collard greens or bitter cherries.
From the top of a hill, we search for the beautiful Ice
Age armadillo, who, when I was a kid, I’d draw all day
long with a 4B pencil, a smudgy graphite made of clay
from a hill of coal in Arkansas. We find tobacco seeds,
Durer’s sedge, Ozark orchids, trillium, where highways
led to a village at Cahokia, St. Louis, where I discovered
Langston Hughes in a prairie culvert, back when I drove
to Little Rock with my punk rock partner, we ride over
armor-plated roadkill and dream of their paleo-ancestors
who’d have barreled down Route 40 to run right over us.
Coelacanth
We live by the law of the ocean, whether we’re angling off
Kodiak, Kamchatka or in the Comoros. Even up the Atlas
Mountains, the hills of Sinai, once under ocean waves, our
forbearers, the bright-blue lungfish, used to prowl in mud.
Pangea formed from Gondwana, Laurasia, the intervening
crags hid all manner of sea life growing limbs and crawling
out upon the land. Today Jean Pascal and I try fishing on a
pier in Saint-Denis, Reunion, hoping for a bite before noon.
Off Madagascar, Mauritius, Malabar, contiguous, territorial,
trawlers pull in coelacanths, over decades, from the depths
of the twilight zone. To melodies about a hippo graveyard,
a Portuguese flag flying high on the vessel we later charter
to meet a Greenpeace tug, a living fossil grabs my line, pulls
like there’s no tomorrow, only yesterday-- and I reel him in.
Pakicetus
As to a god in Ovid, I sing to you a transfiguration
of the dog into whale before your eyes, 50 million
years ago, when the Tethys Sea was widening, near
where Cardiff met Karachi. The tale starts then and
comes right down to now. Four-footed fish-eating
kin to a hippo and a crocodile, it bathed in swamps:
I survey the floodplain for paw tracks of the beast.
Pakicetus, with gawky legs, a lizard’s mandible, jaws
of steel, with molars, flexible neck, sinewy, scaly tail
and gills, lungs and dorsal fins like a billfish, a nose,
whiskers, on its snout. Evolutionarily, this cetacean
developed hooves and underwater hearing. Tasting,
touching, what did it listen to in the shallow waters?
Every crackling shrimp, sea horse burp, each bubble
from the knightia fish (the state fossil of Wyoming).
From cur to lanky salamander on a warming earth,
while beings slunk out of the murky depths, it left
the land for cooler, crueler living, inch by inch, year
by year to become the humpback with its inner ear
for music. What of its song? It went from wolf pack
howls to pulsing mews sounding deep within the sea.
Neander Valley
In Düsseldorf, as close to Lascaux as I’ll ever go,
we walk the Schnauzer Nellie through tulip trees,
down gorges, looking for beet roots, mushrooms,
maybe the mitochondrial DNA of our next-door
neighbor artist friends in North Rhine-Westphalia
in a cave near the Cliff of Dogs. Did Neanderthals
have dogs? Did they make art? Osprey beak, bone
diadems, those necklaces I made from clay, baked
to be like Pueblo charms. We come upon signs of
massive hunting troupes. In Gibraltar, they gorged
on mussels, elephant seals, maybe even porpoises,
the remains of bluest antelope. Gone now because
of climate change, disease, genetic drift. Down by
a babbling brook, the Neanderthal is still inside us.
Shrub-ox
Ice-age ruminant, ancestor to cattle, a most valued beast
in the history of our kind. Europa fell for you, had your
sons, underworld kings by Zeus. Around me dairy cows
are grazing in the daisies and an ox set on a water wheel
slogs in circles by the banks of the Yangtze River, by the
seafood markets of Wuhan, where the pandemic blazed
and spread wildly while we were thinking of other things.
Maybe the primeval steer is a golden idol of what we are,
what we’ve done in six thousand years of human history.
For we all rely on grasslands, keen to trample them down
for animals that plod along as we build temples or towers
in the name of the great ox god. Euceratherium, a native
of the green world we’ve tried to plunder, akin to Asia’s
aurochs, bring us meat, milk, to create this meadow new.
La Brea Tar Pits
We’re watching La Brea on TV, maybe it’s an iPad,
tar pits bubble black gold just blocks from Wilshire
Boulevard, where bones of a thousand dire wolves
lay in Hollywood mire. We walk in rows of ocotillo,
drive a Cadillac to an ocean pier, wake 10,000 years
into a past of mastodons and crabs along the shore.
It’s Dante’s inferno all over again, where one stage
of purgatory is stubbornness, an asphalt cavern is
dark matter that I can grasp. Here is Tarzan, Jane
and Cheetah in a canopy above a pit of quicksand
where mammoths rise as tall as the spires at Watts.
Being quick to vagaries of language and evolution,
we gather up salt bush, dogwood, pine, purple sage
and buckwheat from the shadows of a fossil garden.
Clovis Culture
My brother and I drive to Clovis to visit a chili truck farm.
Cholla is everywhere in bloom, a timeless desert billboard
reads ‘Impeach,’ whomever, whenever, however we evolve
from red to blue, as we help to shape the lives of children.
TV soccer half-time at the Bandolero Brewery-- was it ever
this way, even Clovis men or women reading radio galaxies
as fuel for their enemies? Fornax A or Messier 87 with its
voracious maw, its constellation gobbling up the dog stars.
Clovis culture, defined by points of flint or flakes, is what
we grew up with, whooping with bows and arrows and six-
shooters on the Connecticut River. At Blackwater Locality
No. 1, we gather stones for our nephews and our daughters.
The Younger Dryas glacial climate change? Brrr. It led to so
much faunal extinction-- Mississippian, Woodland-- now us.
Pleistocene Park
We grab parkas and heavy woolen socks to explore the mammoth
steppes, just waiting for tourists and their dollars. Arctic sinkholes,
yaks the size of BMWs. Hairy cattle trampling miles of permafrost
to sequester half a billion tons of carbon in a Northern Serengeti.
Open 24 hours, the park is icy tundra, not so far from the Siberian
Sea. Imagine early hominids traveling on sleds across a land bridge
free from ice nearly 5,000 years ago in search of megafauna. Tuba
clouds, banner clouds, push the slant of horizon as winter comes
on in full force. Camelops, bison, Yakutian horses, new to a land
torn up by magma, may be the ones to stay. Larch and elm cover
this sleeping land where cave lions braved the polar winds, pocket
prairies resembled red savannas, sloping meadows of wheatgrass,
bunchgrass, melt grass, needlegrass, Asian globeflower, snakeroot,
tor-grass, millet, sedge, rewilding a park for another Age of Plains.
Snowball Earth
Does everyone already know the story of Snowball Earth?
Where’ve I been for all the years of our tiniest of lifetimes?
Why am I just now learning about our billions of galaxies
and only a few of them have names, like Pancake, Seashell,
Cat’s Paw, Beehive, Whirlpool, Starfish, LMC, Andromeda,
Triangulum, surrounding our warming, un-glaciating Earth,
shrapnel from a Big Bang hurtling around us and inside us,
big freeze, supernova heat ray releasing metals into space,
sea, a grain of sand, what we breathe in, how infinitesimally
minuscule we are, how lucky we are to be here, once willing
to dream beyond a frozen world, to care for those around us
in our nearest neighborhoods or friends in Kabul and Kiev,
to share our fortunes, kissing, making up, denying autocrats,
working to make a greener and more fertile Snowball Earth?