Drip Drop

 

What’s the cosmos up to today floating in oblivion or smiling at the moon I’m up to my ears in omens sea rise volcanic eruptions hurricanes tornados floods and famine such is life on Planet Earth in the twenty-first century shards of nostalgia lay at my feet white anchor sunk in green clover by the Swiftsure Yacht Company paint flaking bits of rusty anchor visible the reality underneath it’s always there you have to know how to look for it this is why poetry is a noetic practice gentle rise of U.S. flag in front of Boat World westerly breeze off Seattle’s Lake Union Seattle Gasworks Plant still stands at its northern end which shut down in 1956 and opened as a park in 1975 there remains thousands of yards of arsenic laced mud at the bottom of Lake Union and an underground plume of benzene was burned off in late 2000

Soft crepuscular light on mounds of snow in the Turtle Mountains of North Dakota dad’s watercolor hanging on our bedroom wall if nostalgia is a place of illusion what is remorse data gathered by the World Glacier Monitoring Service from 1980 to 2012 shows twenty-five consecutive years of negative mass balances for glaciers around the globe since 1974 the terminus of Alaska’s Gulkana glacier has lost 500 feet of thickness Wickersham Wall on Denali’s north heavily glaciated face is seeing its glaciers calving off leaving behind exposed rock drip drop drip drop drip drop these are nonlinear changes that aren’t based on a simple proportional relationship between cause and effect

Does reality even exist or is it a product of language Keith Richards’ wheezy laugh the aggregate of multiple nonlinear changes is enormous in orders of magnitude there’s something about a blue light I find wistful sad and dreamy this is a function of being drip drop drip drop  what’s a word it’s the copy in sound of a nerve stimulus remarked Nietzsche endearing the way cats rub their heads on things you like things that catch your interest they like it because you like it Lew Welch in a deerskin coat dark pensive eyes mouth closed in what is almost a smile hunched in shamanic bemusement they never did find his body