- In praise of arithmetic
reasons to doubt/believe
“fragments from the wreck of an ancient world”
is from Joseph Dalton Hooker
“branches were broken off that I might be grafted in”
is from Romans 11.19
partita
An economist gives a lecture at Oxford in which he claims
population growth is always good.
He has probably never seen the starlings.
\\
On March 6, 1890, pharmaceutical manufacturer Eugene Schieffelin
released 60 starlings into Central Park,
thinking they wouldn’t survive the winter.
From space, they would have looked like grains of sand
fluttering into the streets.
\\
In the summer, I wake before sunrise
and bring my camera outside to catch the birds.
A crow stands on the ridge of our neighbour’s roof,
looks down at the lifted lens,
round and heavy like the mouth of a cannon,
flies off.
\\
The edge of a storm bites into an electric wire.
The sky cracks like a walnut against concrete.
The fields open their mouths to rain.
Somewhere on the other side of the world,
a fire torches a forest,
the branches impatient to burn after drought.
\\
In Sumatra, a boy cuts down a sweetleaf tree,
and a bird falls into his hand.
He holds it up to his ear,
and the forest roars in its beak.
\\
After my first time at church,
the rector tells me about the starlings in the eaves
who peck holes into the pews mid-sermon
and steal coins from the collection trays.
That’s the Lord’s sense of humour,
he says,
and I am converted.
\\
Imagine what it’s like to summon the sun
morning after morning after morning
from over the horizon—never to sleep
but always to be dragging the earth around its axis.
\\
subtract (v.) — to make smaller by removal of a portion
to make smaller by removal
to make smaller
to make small
to make
\\
given: the shadow of a starling in the backyard grass
prove: the existence of 200 million starlings in North America
given: a specimen in a museum case
prove: the extinction of a taxon
given: a beam of rough wood above a city sidewalk
prove: a nest
given: a tree
prove: an egg
\\
multiply (v.) — to make larger or more numerous by duplication
to derive a copy, as with a mimeograph
to propagate oneself
to propagate oneself to propagate oneself
to propagate oneself to propagate oneself to propagate oneself to propagate oneself
\\
When you chop down a tree, you topple a world.
When you fell a forest, you silence a universe.
In the movies, the light will play against a silent canvas,
the pianist flustered by the impossibility of birdsong.
\\
I twist clay into a bird mid-flight.
In the kiln, it falls over, chips its wing.
I have nowhere to keep it in my apartment,
no way to grasp the sky and lay it out on the windowsill.
\\
In 1886, ornithologist Frank Chapman
counted 40 bird species on 542 hats
worn by women in Manhattan.
Waxwings, terns, herons, woodpeckers, jays—
these were the making of the American middle class.
\\
The first accountants drew lines in the sand:
|
mine | yours
|
as if we could possess numbers—
as if we could fathom the reach of the birds.
\\
A starling stops to rest on a fence across the road
and looks at me.
I picture its body cut away on one side,
organs dyed in neon reds and blues,
worms woven slant into the bodywork.
The starling nods.
Two hundred years ago,
Eugene Schieffelin thought he would find my ancestors’ bodies
laid out on the ground like that,
frost having cut away the skin on top
and dragged it downstream with the winter.
He never found those bodies,
and you will never find mine.
\\
The sun burns its silhouette into the crown of my head
while I stand and watch the starlings,
thousands of miniature surfers on invisible waves,
each carving out a corner of the atmosphere,
unbounded, immeasurable, just beyond the span of a human hand.
because the olive sprouts
back when cut down, so
that it grows a tree within
a tree within a tree
because the last wild St.
Helena olive died in 1994,
having given itself over to
Atlantic storms
because olives hold pieces
of the sun inside, waiting
for the wind to blow them
open
because the last captive St.
Helena olive died in Kew
Gardens in 2003, swarmed
by termites
because oil from true olive
trees lights itself
because St. Helena has no
lighthouse, but instead 700
skyward steps along an old
cable railway
because olive trees, like
people, become knotted in
old age
because fauna on St.
Helena have evolved to
drink salt air
because some olive trees
in Israel still bear fruit
after a thousand years
because St. Helena olives
sprouted wooden seed
capsules instead of coffee
and fish
because the true cross was
carved from an olive tree
because the last St. Helena
olives fell on foreign soil
in a Victorian glasshouse
because branches were
broken off that I might be
grafted in
because olives are but
fragments from the wreck
of an ancient world
because the faithful may
sow and reap, tread the
olives and anoint
themselves with oil
because the faithless must
be shaken and beaten into
submission
because oil numbs all
wounds with bittersweet
because no one mourns a
tree when it goes the way
of all flesh, but only a
species at its end
somewhere between the scratched CD that shatters every phrase before its climax
and the letters in ancient Greek manuscripts that go on and on without breath,
the earth rolls over like dough or thunder, and a finch, mouth full of rum,
squeezes into the gap. the horizon rains untitled memories, mutilated by the waves
in the corner of its eye. stray seeds gather in a half-excavated skull, and a swift
flies figure-eights opposite its destination. winter is a political act, like exile,
only salted and hypothermic—a state in which, by law, water freezes midair
and sunlight suspends itself above the clouds. during these months, I wrestle
with my god, thinking maybe it was me who had too much faith and him not enough,
since I paid the tithe twice in a year and still am not saved. if ever I have been
estranged from myself, I have forgotten. once, I cracked open my skull like a
half-boiled egg while fire consumed a mountain range. afterward, my wound closed;
the Earth’s did not. dust cut down the north on summer solstice and annihilated
the tide. some say the harvest is permanence, but who knows when the ground
will shift again with sprout? when warming air will lift fresh spores out of the sea?
and when it does, will we care? or will we look away, ashamed, and ask ourselves
if it isn’t a marvelous thing to catch the sky off guard with rain or to brush a hillside
flat with just your fingertips and find shards of root scattered like feathers in the soil?
