Palisades Kepler
from The Boston Review, 19 February 2014
N.B.: N is gone to Mexico City this week and I've had two sick girls and an injured girl, so I haven't written. Here's a poem from THE BOSTON REVIEW, born out of camping by myself at a state park in Iowa, which was a good remedy for a busted heart. Last fall I camped alone in northern New Mexico, a good remedy for a blue mind. I've long thought that public lands and public parks were the glory of the United States. Thank you to everyone who is fighting (donating, tree sitting, calling, camping, estate planning, using, cleaning, repairing, mending, organizing, speaking or writing about, getting on the board/committee/call for) our public lands, that they not be privatized, sold, fracked, paved, lost. . PALISADES KEPLER To ditch oneself among the state-park shangri-las, little squander, little arval & what a rusty spread I took my pulped heart camping no one would kill me there Dusty jars of marshmallow bait flush toilets, just off the interstate The missus shuffles, her mister cuts the deck they’ve poured concrete & aim to winter here No matter I’ve got an inland trick to learn it goes like this: you disappear There are powers There are secret passageways Sometimes all the crickets in a single valley go off, so To pull out the stops is an organist’s job What I hear in this air is an old theater full of galvanized dead They play that organ like a drum no one can stop such singing & everyone in history who got hacked to bits is stitched & I’m off like a firecracker . P.S. I began a new series: GOOD EGGS. These are admirable dead people, that I draw on blown eggs. The first one is Alexei Navalny, dissident. It has been medicine for me to meditate on the great gift that is his life. The dark sky behind his face is meant to suggest the prison, above the Arctic Circle, with little daylight, where he died. His green shirt is to recall the zelyonka attack used against him and many other Russian dissidents. The red carnations on the egg's back are what mourners brought to his coffin, at real personal risk, in heaps after he died. I will sell these eggs and give the money to organizations doing good work for vulnerable places and people. First up: public lands.
