This Riesling carries the terroir
of the Lake Seneca coast,
the wine label says. Somebody has to
review these products. I hope you don’t
wonder who I am
when I talk like this,
that you can trust this guano
ethos attuned to mineral and stone.
The birds are mostly gone.
I don’t question owls and bats
nor do I worry
about clean talon marks along
the thoraxes of voles, but I wonder
where the birds have gone.
The carrion birds are gone;
we could use them.
There is an ethic of indifference
you may’ve noticed morphing
into a dogged brand of putrefaction
in recent years; nobody says
“feline” as an adjective
for endurance, but a grey
and white cat with a mewl
like an infant has crossed
our yard a dozen times today.
I was recently wondering
if the gerund use of mewling
could embody a genitive case
but then couldn’t figure out
what I meant by “embody”
in the commission of Cartesian
grammars. It’s easy to be
a cat and castigate the present
while ignoring the role your habits
play in the degradation of
an ecosystem.
People are different, conscious
as they are of finitude
and posterity, and there’s no question
of resources. I thought maybe
you needed me to tell you that.
People are different. There’s
no question of resources.
A cat will rarely lap wine.
A yard is three feet, but I’m using
a metaphor of municipal proportions
rather than a strict unit of measurement.
Great plural nouns like “gymnasia”
don’t beg to be used;
their sense of utility is shot
through with several frozen epochs
that see glaciations advance, retreat,
and give birth to new geologies
before they are uttered again.
Yards, however, beget
yards once the indexical
mania takes chain link and unwinds it.
Too small to accumulate
a history or significance
that we might’ve assigned Erie in its
bellwether mid-eutrophic period
(James Joyce postulated
that Atlantis lay in Erie’s algal depths,
in that great layck of oxygen),
the Finger Lakes eschew
sublimity for elegance.
The Finger Lakes lie south
of Lake Ontario on the northern
edge of the Allegheny Plateau
in an over-deepened glacial valley
below any continuous surveyor’s
line. You told me I was giving
the finger to the Finger Lakes
when I said I’d never heard
of the region’s Riesling.
We had Oneida pickerel
(such perdurant creatures) with
the wine. “That cat needs
Latin lessons,” I told you as it traipsed
through our yard again. But
what it was saying in that mewl
like an infant’s cry was clear
to me as a declension
among the redolent perfume of vines.
For language, geological and consumerist,
acutely adjectival, mycelial
in the hyphae of the neurons
it lights up, can militate
the dreadful need
to teach or geyser aqueous volcanos
in the blue ice near the shore
or soothe like the cold white wine
of winter.