Writing Nature Poetry in Brooklyn: A Conversation with Colin Cheney

Listen above or download. Running time: 12 minutes, 40 seconds.

Poet Colin Cheney recites his poems, "South Brooklyn Casket Co." and "Roof-meadows," talks with Zachary Sussman about nature in urban spaces, and reads students' haiku from the River of Words project.

South Brooklyn Casket Co.

The casket makers by the Gowanus
have no dead to speak of, no dead
to question on the opening of other worlds.
School of milky fry, pulsing jellyfish,
a bag of oysters hung from the bridge:
each a place-holder.
The emptied cemetery November was
left me speaking through the throat-song
of a beauty rose, harmonium
& disturbance sustained on a single breath.
By the deli, the tang of last night’s sewage
on my tongue, a Jehovah’s Witness asks if I’m saved.
I say a woman I followed over the green water
this morning had the word Feel
tattooed on her neck, or maybe
I only want to tell him this, believing the scrawl
on that last vertebrae
marks the tunnel bearing tide from the buttermilk
channel to the dead-end estuary I followed her across.
We must say what the moon can’t,
utter what might carry the dead oysters,
the hollow elegies the Gowanus coffins
became last week when the canal
overflowed, might bear them on a gush
of gasoline & jellyfish
becoming the hybrid of this & former worlds.

Roof-meadows

1.

After Roethke

Nothing would root in that roof, sterile as tar.
Seedlings sucked at the soil thirsting for rain in that earth,
feelers sagged, sun-scorched,
limp succulent cuttings on concrete pavers
lay like spilt fluid, green impotent seeds.
Though on the neighbor's sill
purslane leaves like fetus thumbs,
sea-worm stalks, piss gold, tentacled,
rooted in wind-dust, pigeon bone-meal blown into a chink.
Nothing we'd plant took
even as the city's unwanted green began to breathe.

2.

The poem, the meadowed roof, what each bird signifies.
What erasure the botanical names for things enacts,
what is seen in the deadheaded, the rose-apples.
The count of petals the difference between a crime
with no victims & the perpetrator’s mind.
Sampire, cranesbill, balloon flower—the sense of leaf
& rot, vein & root drowned by association.
Cuckoo-bud, auricula, crowflower: picture them
in your mind, roots burrowing toward bitumen
for lack of rain, as though for worms. They are nothing like
what is pictured—the raped, the abortive, the loaded
pistol in the sock drawer with a pouch of rose petals.
The copper leaching in summer storm is a slaughter,
the rain raising the earthworms to spill over
the sidewalk becomes a forgiveness of blossom, of fruit.