OnEarth Podcast

Poet Kimiko Hahn on the Voyage Home

Zachary Sussman — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

Listen above or download. Running time: 6 minutes, 8 seconds.

Poet Kimiko Hahn recites her poem "Bumblebees" and talks with Zachary Sussman about her fascination with insects and the difference between quiescence, acquiescence, and simple stupidity.

Bumblebees

The foraging bee that doesn't make it
back to the hive

and companion warmth
fastens to a leaf.

Bumbling-bees?

Or does the nectar so distract

it forgets the cells
called home?

The lapse is a cause for concern
the entomologist reports --

because its tiny body slows to the stillness of dew.
Is that quiescence

or acquiescence?

Or simple stupidity
one always forgets a day later?

The Frog with Fifteen Legs: Artist Brandon Ballengée on the Amphibian Crisis

Emily Voigt — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

Listen above or download. Running time: 6 minutes, 39 seconds.

Environmental artist Brandon Ballengée talks with Emily Voigt about the sensitivity of amphibians, a global rise in deformed frogs, and his attempt to breed back an extinct strain of African toad.

"DFA 83, Karkinos"
Scanner Photograph of Cleared and Stained Multi-limbed Pacific Tree frog from Aptos, California in Scientific Collaboration with Dr. Stanley K. Sessions. MALAMP titles in collaboration with the poet KuyDelair.
H 47.5 inches x W 35.5 inches
Unique print on watercolor paper 2001/07
Courtesy the Artist and Archibald Arts, NYC

More Info
» Watch Brandon Ballengée at work in a wetland environment

Green Beyond the Grave

Emily Voigt — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

Listen above or download. Running time: 6 minutes, 25 seconds.

Joe Sehee, the executive director of the Green Burial Council, talks with Emily Voigt about conscientious decomposition.

The Coal Ash Disaster: A Voice from the Ground

Emily Voigt — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

Listen above or download. Running time: 6 minutes, 32 seconds.

Matt Landon, a volunteer with United Mountain Defense, talks with Emily Voigt about the magnitude of the coal ash disaster at the Tennessee Valley Authority power plant in Kingston, Tennessee.

Lessons of the Buffalo: Author Steven Rinella on a Hunter's Conservation Ethic

Emily Voigt — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

Listen above or download. Running time: 6 minutes, 26 seconds.

The author Steven Rinella talks with Emily Voigt about his book "American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon," the tragic history of North America's largest land mammal, and his personal quest to hunt one in the wilds of Alaska.

More info
» Read review of Steven Rinella's "American Buffalo," from OnEarth's Winter 2009 issue

Poet David Wagoner on the Wilderness Inside Us

Zachary Sussman — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

Listen above or download. Running time: 7 minutes, 44 seconds.

Poet David Wagoner recites his poems, "Letting the Grass Grow Under Your Feet" and "By A Pond," and talks with Zachary Sussman about finding belonging in a landscape and letting go of anger over environmental ills.

Letting the Grass Grow Under Your Feet

It would rather not
    but of course it will.
          If you've tried standing on it
long enough, those blades
     will insist on a way out
          from under and up at last
into the light. You don't
     have to let it do that
          because it will. No matter how
stubbornly or heavily you bear down,
     something inside its cells
          doesn't believe in you
and your latent energy,
     your postponements of action,
          your useless indecision. It will grow
sideways and turn yellow or under pressure
     nearly white. It will turn
          to an almost all uprooted root for a while,
then send those blades (in spite
     of how long you stand in the way)
          up and around you.

By A Pond

Its face, as calm as the air,
holds an inverted world
of trees and a trembling sky,
and I'm looking at a garden
as far away from my eyes
as if I lay under water.

What the seers and sibyls learned
in their rippling mirrors no one
can say for sure. A dropped stone
would send it flying and show
where the earth begins again.

All I can ask for answers
from what I see in my mirror
are the shades of apple blossoms
over which water striders
lighten the touch of bees
against the mud of heaven.

City Girl in the Country: A Conversation with Poet Roberta Swann

Zachary Sussman — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

Listen above or download. Running time: 10 minutes, 47 seconds.

Poet Roberta Swann reads her poem, “Looking Back,” and talks with Zachary Sussman about weekend naturalists, fashionable insects, and what one may see in a fly's hundred eyes.

Looking Back

You can take a city girl to the country,
and get her to get on with worms,
a plague of caterpillars even,
this year's ladybugs--who doesn't like a ladybug?
But heaps, everywhere?

Back on the deck, breaking in another bikini,
she sunbathes, watching hummingbirds chase one another
from the feeder, until a chickadee runs them both
out of town--tourists anyway.

He's off
planting heirlooms, while crows hang in pines,
waiting for action. Everything is la di da, until
a neighbor starts shooting off guns and firecrackers.
And flies arrive. Slap. Spray. Pray. Plead. Read labels.
Realize repel and discourage are code for: Good Luck!

The only way out is in. So she slips into something
less comfortable and takes a walk. That neighbor
roaring by on his ATV calls out: " Happy Memorial Day!"
She recovers on a rock. Listens to wind. La di da.
Until flies arrive. She sprays. One dances on the nozzle,
slim legs tap-tapping high heels on marble.
Such footwork! Who could hate such a fly?
She looks closer. Takes off rose-tinted Gucci glasses
and sees its hundred eyes looking back.

Thousand Mile Song: Further Adventures in Interspecies Jazz

Emily Voigt — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

Listen above or download. Running time: 6 minutes, 10 seconds.

Interspecies musician David Rothenberg talks with Emily Voigt about his book "Thousand Mile Song" and the challenges of playing jazz with whales.

Why Birds Sing: Talking with Interspecies Musician David Rothenberg

Emily Voigt — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

Listen above or download. Running time: 5 minutes, 32 seconds.

Musician and author David Rothenberg talks with Emily Voigt about jamming with birds.

Protecting the Journalists Who Protect the Earth

Emily Voigt — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

Listen above or download. Running time: 6 minutes, 10 seconds.

Joel Simon, the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, talks with Emily Voigt about the dangers of environmental reporting and our global stake in a free press.

Related
» Listen to or read Simon's contribution to OnEarth's Winter 2009 issue, "Why the Planet Needs a Free Press"

Why the Planet Needs a Free Press

Emily Voigt — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

Listen above or download. Running time: 5 minutes, 15 seconds.

Joel Simon, the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, reads his essay from OnEarth's Winter 2009 issue, "Why the Planet Needs a Free Press."

A Worm's Eye View of Global Warming: Talking with Poet Elton Glaser

Zachary Sussman — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

Listen above or download. Running time: 9 minutes, 42 seconds.

Poet Elton Glaser recites his poem, "Ozone Alert," and talks with Zachary Sussman about strange weather in Ohio, mourning his hometown of New Orleans, and shaping tragedy into art.

Ozone Alert

The last of June burns to the third degree,
Sun swelling like a blister on the sky.

For once, I'd rather be breathing out
Little clots of cold from a thin winter.

Robins fan themselves with their hot wings
And worms slink deeper for some dark relief.

From the bossy radio, warnings not to gas a tank
Or blaze a barbecue with forbidden fuel.

Good citizen that I am, I won't mow the lawn
Or let asthmatic joggers run their noonday routes.

I won’t open a hydrant in the street, even though
Every pore on me opens like a spout.

Wherever the wind's gone, I want to go, too.
Leaves hang like the tongues of tired dogs.

Others may shade themselves in the cool of movies
Or float over the chlorine ripples of a pool.

Should I shut the windows tight and turn
The thermostat as low as the level of polar floes?

Night can't come soon enough for me, or storms
That drain the heat and douse the summer air.

What Makes an Eco-Town Green: Rethinking Main Street with NRDC Smart Growth Director Kaid Benfield

Emily Voigt — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

Listen above or download. Running time: 6 minutes, 53 seconds.

Kaid Benfield, Director of NRDC's Smart Growth Program, talks with Emily Voigt about taking a cue from historic districts and the imminent death of American sprawl.

A Farmer's Quest for a Truly Local Brew

Emily Voigt — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

Listen above or download. Running time: 6 minutes, 12 seconds.

Farmer Rick Pedersen talks with Emily Voigt about bringing hops back to New York state, and the challenges of producing a truly local beer.

Writing Nature Poetry in Brooklyn: A Conversation with Colin Cheney

Zachary Sussman — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

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.

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.

Alan Burdick: Welcome to My Paperless World

Emily Voigt — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

Listen above or download mp3. Running time: 4 minutes, 45 seconds.

Science writer Alan Burdick reads his humorous essay, "Welcome to My Paperless World."

Dreaming of a Paperless Life

Emily Voigt — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

Listen above or download mp3. Running time: 4 minutes, 35 seconds.

Author Alan Burdick talks with Emily Voigt about his ongoing fantasy of leading a paperless life and his upcoming book about finding, saving and wasting time.

Related:
» Listen to or read Burdick's contribution to OnEarth's Fall 2008 issue, "Welcome to My Paperless World"

Poet Kevin Stein on Changing the Course of the Environmental Nightmare

Zachary Sussman — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

Listen above or download the mp3 file. Running time: 13 minutes, 11 seconds.

Poet Kevin Stein recites his poem, “Mowing the Lawn,” and talks with Zachary Sussman about summertime, politics, and the global repercussions of our everyday lives.

Mowing the Lawn

Putt putt, I ride on fossil fuel, the juice of fern and leaf, 
the muck of once-was. Putt putt, I warm our globe 
one green acre at a time. As a boy, I mowed without gas power 
as does my buddy Dean: Green Dean. Back then as now
it was economics not ecology. Have you priced a hybrid?

I pushed, I sweated, I earned a man’s allowance, 
not unlike Tag, the bow-legged Japanese gardener 
who plucked the lawn's eyebrows for my grandmother, 
she of blue hair and lace gladiolas terraced along 
the terra cotta porch. She of the voice that curdled milk.

Tuesdays he made landfall, hurricane of shears and clippers, 
toting the lone mower he’d not so much push as chase. 
Tag had no time for lost time, though just to be sure 
the war-time feds interned him to save us from the Japs 
he wasn't. The Republic’s no match for paranoia.

Once, chasing the wiffle ball of my World Series, 
I spilled over Tag yanking weeds beside the arched porch 
trellised with trumpet creeper and the strumming 
of hummingbird wings, thrum of this world, 
his knees keeping the porch safe for democracy.

That good man sang foreign to me and I got scared -- 
as kids will. But I didn’t care -- as kid’s won’t, 
I please wanted my ball please, which he found 
amidst a clutch of dandelions he’d turn to wine. 
Come winter he sipped the bittersweet of our fear.

Poet Alison Hawthorne Deming on What Nature Teaches -- If We Listen

Emily Voigt — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

Poet and essayist Alison Hawthorne Deming reads her essay "Brief Encounter on The Savanna," and talks with Emily Voigt about interpreting elephants, the importance of animal stories, and how our better intentions can be fueled by the simple contemplation of natural beauty.

A Not-So-Crazy Scheme for Solving Global Warming?

Emily Voigt — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

Emily Voigt talks with Columbia University earth scientist Wallace Broecker, co-author of Fixing Climate, the latest in a spate of books on the seemingly intractable problem of global warming. Broecker and his co-author Robert Kunzig embrace a techno-fix to carbon dioxide emissions that was pioneered by physicist Klaus Lackner. The plan: scrub CO2 from the atmosphere and bury it deep within the ground in liquid form.

More Info
» Read review of Broecker and Kunzig's "Fixing Climate," from OnEarth's Spring 2008 issue.

Revenge of the Weeds: Talking with Poet John Bensko

Zachary Sussman — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

Poet John Bensko recites his poem, "Weeds," and talks with Zachary Sussman about karma, conflict, and seeing beyond the film of familiarity.

Weeds

How we love your legs, how
in the midst of plenty
we have learned to know

the hardship of hatred.
How your blade cuts us,
and the hooves of your stock tread

our stalks to mud. In spring's
gentle sunlight we emerge from clover
and grow lush beside that other spring,

the one of water you would wish
to lie down beside
were it not for us.

When you burn us in the field
we rise to the sky
in orange flame and yield

a smoke that blots the sun.
How then the wind may conspire
to turn us again

toward you. We cover you once
more, no longer in the green itch
you hated, but the darkness.

Poet Pattiann Rogers: Everything out there is saying 'Yes.'

Zachary Sussman — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

Pattiann Rogers recites her poem, "This Day, Tomorrow, And The Next," and talks with Zachary Sussman about how science is expanding the range of poetic possibilities.

This Day, Tomorrow, And The Next
When the blind and the deaf walk
together into the forest, one of them
understands the blackness of light
on a clear day. The other understands
the deep reach of stillness in a riot of green.

Both alike feel on their faces
the floating threads and tatters
of occasional sun passing through
the canopy of overlapping branches,
close thatch of needles, uneven roof
of broad leaves. And both can name
the fragrances of sweet sap and damp
soil, sodden cones, rain-filled mosses.

But neither encounters the burrow
of the fungus beetle leaving her eggs
in the dank of a fallen fir. Neither
is aware of the yellow of the jewelweed
to come. Neither is aware of the taste
of the salmonberry to be. Neither imagines
the spirit-deer made of thicket shadows,
the deer known only when imagined.

Within their inevitable errors
each regrets, each beholds.
Both put their hands the same
into the snow waters of the creek,
the flow pushing equally against
the pressure of their place.
But only one tilts toward the single
twitch-sluff of ground leaf where
the red newt slides. And only
one of them finds and lifts the red
newt from its rust-red leaf.

Each can hold a river-smooth
rock, feel the circle-leading allure
of its edges, remember by finger
and palm the shape and heft
of before the beginning. Within
their frailties, each asserts, each fears.

And for a brief moment either
of them might conceive and come
to love that which exists solely
as the possibility of radiant
green fernleaf fronds spreading
over the forest floor, yellow-green
and black-green fir and cedar,
hemlocks filled with hanging moss
shags, the possibility of a ruffled
spill of lichens, the rip of a steel
blue creek, the chip zeet of dipper,
the slow swing of autumn fog
up the hillside, conceive and love
that possibility alone which attends
steadily without ears and watches
forever without eyes.

Bangladesh Before the Flood, Part II

Emily Voigt — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

OnEarth Articles Editor George Black traveled through Bangladesh for this summer's cover story, The Gathering Storm. Hear more of Emily Voigt’s interview with Black about changing environmental and political climates in one of the world’s most at-risk nations.

» Read The Gathering Storm
» Watch Audio Slideshow: Bangladesh Before the Flood

Audio Slideshow: Bangladesh Before the Flood

Emily Voigt — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

As global warming deepens its grip on the world, Bangladesh -- where tens of millions live just a few feet above sea level -- faces a grim prognosis. George Black, author of OnEarth Summer 08 cover story The Gathering Storm, says that Bangladesh “is really where everything converges. Not just topography, but also politics, because this is a Muslim country, it’s an incredibly poor country, it’s a very politically unstable country.... If this plays out as we foresee, you could be talking about major international security crises, humanitarian crises, etc.” (For more background on this story, read OnEarth editor Doug Barasch’s intro, A Storm Warning from Bangladesh.)

In preparing his article, Black traveled the country with landscape photographers Diane Cook and Len Jenshel. Take a trip through the Ganges Delta, with Cook and Jenshel’s photos providing vivid illustration of the story Black tells reporter Emily Voigt.

» Read The Gathering Storm
» Hear more George Black: Bangladesh Before the Flood, Part II

At the Crossroads of Observation and Imagination: Talking with Poet Brendan Galvin

Zachary Sussman — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

Brendan Galvin recites his poem, "Nest" and talks with Zachary Sussman about naturalism, observation, and the fine line poets walk between the perfect poem and going off the edge.

Nest
I found it near that corner where
some Septembers a skinny apple tree
hangs fruit the size of stoplights,
the nest itself a palmful,
fallen intact, the bottom so thin
I'd be thinking about
the faith of scarlet tanagers
had I looked up through it
and counted four blue-green eggs
mottled brown, and the nest itself
like a round of serendipity
aspiring to elegance,
tan grasses and a touch of dander
bound with darker rootlets
and forbs, meaning any herbs
that aren't grass or grasslike,
another collective name for weeds
like dogshade and rattlebox,
the nest itself hinting toward
the centrifugal, the way things go
when a tree one morning spins
its contents outward.

Connecting GIs with Green Jobs

Jori Lewis — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

Jyl DeHaven, founder of Green Collar Vets, and John Wright, one of the program's participants, talk with Jori Lewis about establishing independence and job security through emerging green industries.

» Read Looking for a Few Good Men, from OnEarth's Spring 2008 issue

Related Links
» The Green Collar Solution, Thomas L. Friedman column, New York Times 10.17.07
» Millions of Jobs of a Different Collar, New York Times 3.28.08
» Green for All
» Apollo Alliance
» Switching to Green-Collar Jobs, Business Week 1.10.08

Memory, Age, and Love Poetry: Talking with Poet Daniel Mark Epstein

Zachary Sussman — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

Poet and biographer Daniel Mark Epstein recites his poem, "In Late November," and talks with Zachary Sussman about memory, age, and what it means to be a “love poet.”

In Late November
Of the butterfly-bush, whose purple flowers
The monarch and the swallowtail
Sipped in August, near my windowpane
(Such a wealth of wings and flower clusters
I could hardly see the grass, the trees)
Only stalks and branches remain,
And panicles tipped with russet berries.
Now I see everything so vividly:
The young woman on her hands and knees,
Planting the meek shrubs three years ago --
Three short years and thirteen feet below --
Told me the light was perfect here and so
The plants would thrive, just wait and see
How gracefully the flowers would bear wings.
I would see her when she was not there,
Then go blind, standing right beside her.
How could I begin to explain such things?
Soon enough the blossoms reached my sill,
A floor above her terrace flat. Too late
For her to see the wonder she had wrought
Or for me to tell her. She'd moved out.
I never dreamed these branches in full bloom
Would all but block the summer view below:
Garden, gardener and terrace door,
Casting a dappled shadow across my room.
I never knew that when November came
I would miss the butterflies so much
And see the world more clearly than before.

Hard Choices: George Black on Compromise and the Conservation Ethic

Emily Voigt — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

OnEarth articles editor George Black reads his essay "Time to Be Unfaithful to Old Faithful," and talks with Emily Voigt about controversy and compromise in modern environmentalism.

A Conversation with Poet Chard deNiord

Zachary Sussman — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

Chard deNiord recites his poems, "Tree of Wisdom" and "Behold, The Lord God Bird," talks with Zachary Sussman about enlightenment, and recounts the strange, sad tale of a bird beyond imagination.

Tree of Wisdom
I am taken in by its stand and breadth,
marveling at its brawn and reach of branches,
studying each leaf like the page of a sacred book,
embracing its trunk like a void.
I hear the prophecy of a lark in the density
of foliage: "The vision awaits its time;
hastens to the end." Until this time arrives,
I am content to sit and stare and climb.
I am compelled to bet my life on the fact
that this is the first work of revelation,
calling a tree tree, leaves leaves.
It is the good work of a scientist.
It is the hidden work of a common man.
I say its name like the bird who can't stop singing,
Ten Thousand Things In One, and then this prayer,
Om mani padme hum. The jewel is in the world.
I lie in the shade of its canopy
and listen to the genius above deny her name.
I turn its green to black in order to turn
it back again. I watch its fruit fall in the wind
like proofs for a law that only exists in the mind.
Like a well-stocked house it sustains me,
cleans my lungs with the distillation.
It is my home of transformation
where I remain and disappear.

Behold, The Lord God Bird
Hope is a bird that lives somewhere in a swamp,
unseen but there, like the tree that falls but needs
an ear to make a sound. The jizz of such
a thing is moot without the sighting of
a second birder. Everything we see
must strangely be stranger than what we imagine.
The flocks that fly through the sky of our dreams are hardly
as weird as the common sparrow, since she was spoken
and then translated. It's the words we want behind
the dream and the voice to say them, to make
them real and really strange, but cannot speak
for the length of our tongues. Be thankful, then, an angel
sings in the form of a bird that lived in memory's
overstory for sixty years. In the voice
of a clown at the top of a cypress. Kent! Kent!
she calls, then pauses for a while before resuming
her other song that echoes in our bones as if
they were trees in an ancient forest. Knock-knock!
Knock-knock! Only more and faster.

A Conversation With Poet Mark Halperin

Zachary Sussman — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

Mark Halperin recites his poems "No Two Snowflakes are the Same" and "Quail in December," talks with Zachary Sussman about the mystery of human identity, and questions our faith in knowledge.

No Two Snowflakes Are the Same
How could anyone have checked, or is this
something else to accept on faith, like enough is enough
or what's good for big business
is good for the country and each time I love
you is said it's different? How do you tell
Africans, for whom it's usual

to substitute egret feathers in
translations: no two plumes are a match, and why
does that sound that less dubious? Once you begin
asking there's the icy cold, the six-sided-
symmetry--too much that's unique to trust
induction. Here the rare returns like dust

you can't brush off and yearnings that go on
to become those persistent selves we resume
each morning as if by magic. The power of reason,
like past and future, could be a myth, and Hume,
be right: cause is no more than an habitual
association. Like doubt, but less cruel.

Quail in December
They're scampering under the birdfeeder
they can't fly up to, pecking at, picking up seeds
the sloppy house sparrows and chickadees --
intent on getting it all -- scatter
half of in their frenzied digging. Each quail
sports a question-mark, an ebony curl
that sticks up from its forehead and bobs,
waggles and wiggles as it does, off at a sound
or shadowy sign of danger. Rotund,
as if puffed-out and stuffed, they're gobs
of freckles with slate-gray backs, as single
as slippery drops of mercury that re-pool
again. The one that slammed into
the guest room window -- with such force,
it broke the outer thermopane-glass
and its neck -- left a double halo
of feathers and slivers. May whatever directed it
grant serious us as quick and painless an exit.