D.E. Steward

Oceanrise

 

“You can be up to your boobies in white satin, with gardenias in your hair and no sugar cane for miles, but you can still be working on a plantation.”  (Billie Holiday)

Imagine if Obama had not been elected for two terms, think what the then quiescent rightwing would have been doing in the open all that time

Only ten months until the midterms and a distinct Republican majority thinks the Presidency was stolen  

Imagine if January 6th had concluded differently

Whatever might have happened we would still be peering ahead through the present’s snarl at the planet’s viability crisis

Cluttered with Trump and his conspirators

Imagine dolefully a 2024 Trumpismo coup attempt more thoroughly schemed and more amply resourced

Anti-vax evangelists are dropping from covid, two or three a week

In this tilted off-center country, not only that, there are people trying to detox with nostrums after having a mandated vax

As “of some sort of an interface, yet to be defined interface, between what's being injected in these shots and all of the new 5G towers”

And a private school in Miami ordered its teachers that if they were vaxed to stay away from the students

In this land of stubborn suspicions 

It’s beyond stupidity, it is nuts

What Trump means to these obdurately moronic people

Inflated “Live Free or Die” New Hampshire style

Don’t tread on me

I CALL THE SHOTS, I’D RATHER DIE THAN COMPLY, I’M NOT A SHEEP, INJECTION REJECTION, NOT YOUR LAB RAT, ANTI-VAX TO THE MAX

Going in patriotic drag stage front of the backdrop of simmering ecological disaster

Floods, fires, water shortages, air pollution, starvation, hunger, refugees, immigrants

Deprivation of multiple millions of children  

Populations of hopelessness

Deadended desperate lives

Amid the new universals of ocean rise, droughts, polar ice melt, species extinction

Strange new doomful horrors like the appearance of nurdles, billions of tiny plastic pellets floating in the ocean, as damaging as oil spills and still not classified as hazardous

Allied to marine mucilage and the swirls of plastic trash

In the mysterious ocean

That can be so frightening when you’re out on it

First engagement was weeks on the winter North Pacific charting through forty-five north to fifty degrees of latitude

Both ways on troopships in and out of Korea

Freezing spray, leaden stratus clouds, force six and seven often with blowing snow

Way up over two thousand nautical off Hawaii

In the great North Pacific empty

Under the sway of fulmars, storm petrels and shearwaters 

Random mines floated in those waters then, left from the Japanese harbor security during their occupation of Kiska and Attu in the Aleutians

Watched one mine taken out by a round from a five-inch gun mounted forward on the troopship General W. A. Mann

To the roaring delight of a couple of thousand of us crowding to the gunnels up from the fetor of the vessel’s bowels stacked five-bunks high

The voyage’s big event other than coming in through the Strait of Juan de Fuca on the twenty knot Busan via Yokohama passage to Tacoma

Two North Atlantic winter crossings, one as supercargo from Antwerp minding Volkswagens in the holds of a Finnish freighter, the other a paid passage on a twelve-passenger freighter from Tangier  

And carried for many thousands of blue water miles in the same hull as the owner skipper and the various crews of an old friend’s twenty-eight meter ketch

Pitch, roll and yaw, heave and sway, tack and jibe

The Chukchi and Bering Seas, South Island New Zealand, the eastern Mediterranean, the Maldives, Fiji, Rangiroa, Tahiti, Moorea

We dragged anchor once in a gale in the Aegean and came within feet of losing the boat in darkness on the heavy riprap of a breakwater

On a sailing voyage off Pacific Russia high in the Bering Sea saw a peculiarly unbalanced owner of a big sloop deliberately bump a surfacing gray whale with his dinghy, once or twice tempt walruses to tip it, as he frequently gunned around full bore in dangerous waters

“Remembrance is never more than a flash bulb.”  (George Steiner)

Before global positioning everything on the chart had names, now it is as if the old sense of terra incognita is returning to the planet’s empty quarters

“Lacking names our knowledge of things would perish”   (Linneaus)

And mysteries are omnipresent on the open seas

In human memory there always has been a Gulf Stream off the continent’s Atlantic coast but little awareness of AMOC, Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation

Or of the consequences of a diminished AMOC

But now a haunt is the instability, the big melt of Greenland’s ice sheet staunching the cold saltwater sinking in the north that allows warmer water to sweep north and moderate Eastern North America and Northern Europe  

It means, soon enough perhaps, icebergs off Denmark, all-year snow peaks in Scotland, scant summer weather north of the Alps, year round cold in London and Paris

And Western Atlantic sea ice off the Atlantic Provinces, New England, and points south chilled substantially

Or other unfathomable consequences and modification of the Atlantic’s constants, set since after the last asteroid encounter

One of these, the Antarctic upwelling linked to the Antarctic Circumpolar Current

The Circumpolar Current flows as deeply as two miles, is as wide as twelve hundred

In the waters before the ice far south from Cape Town to Queenstown to Cape Horn, as it rounds the immense Antarctica it draws ancient water from the depths of all three oceans

Some of this upwelling flows beneath the continent’s ice shelves melting Antarctica from the bottom, with as yet uncalculated effects other than adding to the world’s oceanrise

Those ice melts in Greenland and Antarctica are the first major horrors of climate change     

Its emphatic introduction being the present droughts, floods, fires and oceanrise

The terrifying agonies of those disasters’ concomitants

And now into the third covid year

“And the people rushing by are absorbed / in accomplishing something, and no one at all, / in the whole street, is looking ahead or behind.”  (Cesare Pavese, “Atavism”)

New variants, earnest new cautionaries, complicated modifications of directives, startling new numbers

Over eight hundred thousand covid dead here now, with one in a hundred of all people in this country over sixty-five

In our thinning sheaf of days, geezers of the newly doomed

Fauci and the other experts more and more like earnest death angels, obdurate cocksure anti-vax absurdists not only tiresome but scorned now, ridiculed and hated

Anti-vax unmasked and unvaxed arrogants seem increasingly uncomfortable, sidelined in a peculiar macho purdah

Anger grows at the restrictive situation, and fatalism surges, the attenuated ennui and upheaval of what two years ago was normal

For six and eight year olds, half their lives have been covidtized

Now, on top of January 2022, new cases are up forty percent from two weeks ago, and seventy percent up from when they stopped falling a month ago

Things are not looking good and the delta-omicron-what’s-next haunt continues

Johnson and Johnson vaccine is questioned and disadvised, cases are spiking again in
New York City beyond anything seen since last winter, some universities are going remote again, Broadway is shuttering shows, sports reschedule

And nobody knows 

“Watch out or you'll slide / Like a pickup on a curve / With nothing in the bed”  (Frank Stanford)

 

 

Rain Slanted by Wind

 

Zyklon B clotted near the floor when dropped into the chamber

So that the strongest, bleeding from nose and ears, muscle cramps, blistering skin, as did all, crushed the others’ naked bodies climbing to longer survive

The millions

The multitude

Doomed initially by the dreaded rafle

“I am speaking with words / That only this once will arise in my soul”  (Akhmatova)

Of those murdered in the Shoah eighty years ago

For us the immediate past rapidly begins to feel like a chain of docuseries on the population explosion, covid, and global warming but not in color

As the startling climate numbers develop and come clear

Provoking shifted baseline syndrome, SBS

By which each generation sees what is as normal, cannot clearly imagine what used to be 

“a part of eternity lies in reach of those capable of staring, unblinking, at the sea’s deranging expanses”  Niels Bohr

More people knowing more forces numb slackening of the crass 

The systems present closing down on life alternatives

In the nature of the systems’ flaccid earnestness

As a goose walks on sand

Which is how we are now

And, as in infantry combat, the wounded tend to sit bolt upright before dying

Whose witnesses are veterans, years later with secrets curled behind their eyes

As will the youngest surviving us

Later on

“Passion too deep seems like none”  Tu Mu (803-852)

Embarras de souvenirs

Surcharge de réalités

Making hooch and memories very important to old people

As they are much of what they have left

Staring back at their wakes left behind on their long rivers

Obliviousness to time passed

Time toward nothing more at all

Garrulous grinning grouchy geezers

Afloat in their memorial sensoria

Spiderlike ballooning themselves considerable distances

“Nostalgia is one of the most narcotic and beautiful aspects of a comfortable state of being”  Elizabeth Hardwick

Octogenarian perspective approaches that mysterious stance

Sputteringly in ways already theirs

And recognized as such by cohorts

Big cats in dry country after rain lick each other’s pelage for water

We support or kind

We go to geezerheims to visit people

And leave relieved

But imagining wind tumbling through gravestones white from eternity

Then see a child or considered sanities and green things

And are back

To now which is an AR-15 for every twenty Americans 

Look around and step back as if standing on the shoulder of a High Plains interstate “swished around by semis”  Carol Hamilton

And no such thing as a long-term street-fentanyl user, they all die

Van Gogh, “Rain – Auvers” (1890) in Cardiff’s National Museum

Wind puffs the rain as country music flops from a pickup’s open windows

The sun drags across the hot afternoon

As a stump being chain-pulled from the ground

Van Gogh, “Rain” (1889) in the Philadelphia Museum

The hound whines through the screen door and heat-thinned air

Habitually

Mimicking our “modern worry about dying of emotional atrophy”  A. C. Graham

Not the worry of the baboons at Bettys Bay in midmorning descent from Leopard’s Kloof

To the beach at Dawids Kraal from up in the Hottentots-Holland

They would stop by amiably and look into my workroom window

Chacmas down to feed at the sea

They tolerated me if I followed them through the fynbos, Africa’s chaparral, to the sand to sit nearby and watch them pick through the tidal accumulation of the swash

“You should go in for a blending of the two elements, memory and oblivion, and we call that imagination.”  Borges

Not imagined, was there in Bettys Bay for over six very fine months before decamping to old Swaziland (Eswatini)  

To walk the Cape’s empty coast lanes at dusk through the fynbos when the perpetual winds off the ocean went night-verge calm

A malachite sunbird or two, Nectarinia famosa, above on the line that brought electricity in from the road

Small, long curved bill, a male’s tail long as itself

Their silky luster green brilliance dimmed against the dusk’s blanched copper open sky

Malachite sunbirds down to sea level in the Western Cape, otherwise they only nest above twenty-five hundred meters

All the way north to Ethiopia’s highlands 

Their long graceful tails

Long Africa from Cape Point

Driving the Great North Road

The Great Rift, the Congo Basin, the Lakes

Sudan, the Nile, Alexandria

To the Med via Khartoum is not quite ten thousand kilometers

Cape to Kampala done via Johannesburg and Lusaka is nearly five thousand four hundred    

Portions then in Zambia and Tanzania were strip road and fords

With much dust

Managed in a small Volkswagen after six months in Swaziland

Up into in East Africa

And from Kampala to the Swahili coast at Tanga

Tanga means sail

Passages over water

Leaving from Mombasa’s port up the coast later in the year

For Cadiz via Suez

Israel not until a few years on to find the names in stone and bronze at Yad Vashem

Welcomed then to a sunny house in Rehavia in mid-1980s Jerusalem

Dinner that evening on Azza Street, good talk with the next table about the prolific fall migration over Suez

There at that verge of the Indian Ocean’s quarter, so difficult to factor

Shostakovich, Preludes & Fugues, Op. 87: Fugue No 20 in C Minor 

“Against black woods on the high hill, long streaks of the rain”  Tu Mu

 

D. E. Steward mainly writes months. Most of them are published, as is much of his short poetry. Five volumes of his months came out in 2018 as Chroma.