James McCorkle
The Ongoing &
by way of the valley
The Ongoing
Ongoing. Examine this.
This is four years ago, the drought began in 2015, no hubo lluvia, no rain, how many farmers killed themselves? How many fled north? How many starved? How many detained?
The problem is not migration, it is what causes migrations. There are no borders. There are policies and police that state the state demands you not exist, you don’t belong, you must return to what will kill you, as I write this forecasts continue, persistent, July 2019: "The drought has killed us. We lost all our corn and beans," said Olman Funez, a 22-year-old farmer who lives in Orocuina, a rural town in southern Honduras.* Or, "I am 60 years old, and this is the first time I have seen a crisis like this," said Jesus Samayoa, a farmer in Jutiapa, about 160 km (99 miles) from Guatemala City.* Or, Guatemala declared a state of emergency after 256,000 families lost their crop.*
Oxford ecologist Norman Myers, in 2005 said by 2012 there would be 25-million climate fleeing refugees; with other estimates as high as one-billion people by 2050, due to salt-water intrusions into aquifers, the flooding of coastal plains, the scarcity of fresh water, the loss of vegetation.†
Map (A) describes the persistent drought that began in 2015 and continues, affecting the bean and corn (staple foods) growing regions (Source: https://feww.wordpress.com/2015/08/23/prolonged- drought-plagues-central-america/). The regions that have traditionally a surplus of corn are adversely affected and cannot compensate for regions that cannot produce subsistence crops.
Map (B) describes the “Difference between the baseline (1961–1990) and the future (2071–2100) annual mean temperature (°C) simulated by the Eta-HadGEM2 model for the (a) RCP4.5 and (b) RCP8.5 scenarios” [Lyra, A., Imbach, P., Rodriguez, D. et al. Climatic Change (2017) 141, 93: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-016-1790-2].
For the rest of the century, there will be a migration of people northward; the migration will intensify as regions within the continental United States become uninhabitable, or at the very least unable to sustain current standards of living. What is that standard of living currently? According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2018 12.8 million children lived in poverty; the national poverty rate for children was 17.5%. The NCCP [National Center for Children in Poverty] put the number and rate in 2018 at 15 million children or 21% of all children; this is based on federal poverty thresholds, which underestimates significantly the income needed to support a family—a family needs twice the income, thus by this measure the NCCP estimates 43% of US children live in families whose income cannot support them even though parents are working.
I want to write a beautiful poem, so beautiful it moves you, moves you across those deserts across those deserts so beautiful / when the monsoon comes and what is / there blooms once
so beautiful it moves you / to tears, dropping onto the sand bringing back
to life the perished each body a seed dropped, left, for / -gotten / -saken / to move you
to touch me again my breasts / my mouth my neck
to remember our beauty, so moving we would find it again in ourselves in each of us
Map (C) describes the projected deficits of rainfall “between the baseline (1961–1990) and the future (2070–2100) annual mean precipitation (mm/day) simulated by the Eta-HadGEM2 model for the a RCP4.5 and b RCP8.5 scenarios” [Lyra, A., Imbach, P., Rodriguez, D. et al. Climatic Change (2017) 141: 93]. With depleted water sources and significantly higher temperatures, national populations will move.
Todd Miller: “The agent [US Border Patrol] . . . did know, however, about how border enforcement looks from ground level at a Forward Operating Base. Like those deployed in US military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the strategy of a Forward Operating Base is to seize ground and maintain a presence in isolated areas and territories. There are now dozens of such bases in the US-Mexico borderlands” [Storming the Wall, 98].
in each of us, in each one of us, not dis- / posable, body cemented into slabs / of a wall or processing facility / like the meatpacking plants or line-ups / at the edge of a Home Depot / for work shoveling or picking or cleaning, / but taken any day to get / by day by day, crimson sun / late evening and early morning / I want this poem / that will come / rising out of the earth / like a passionflower / a disc of stone / a wafer settled on our tongues, / everything that could be / so we would miss nothing, / the beauty in each one / of us, before / our hearts are walled / in each brick made stone-hard—
“The law enforcement officers that we were with, that gave us this tour, were very different this time around than they had been a couple of months ago when I went. Last time I went, they let me speak to the individuals, the parents. They let me even take a phone in. They let me take a photo with nobody’s faces. This time around, very different. They confiscated telephones. They said, “You’re not even allowed to talk to adults.” And they tried to prevent us from doing that.” Rep. Nanette Barragán (D-CA) [interviewed on Democracy Now, 11 July 2019].
Yazmin Juárez: Four days later, we were sent to the ICE detention center in Dilley, Texas. A nurse examined Mariee when we arrived and found her perfectly healthy. At Dilley, we were packed into a room with five other mothers with children, a total of 12 people in our room. I noticed immediately how many sick kids there were – and no effort was made to separate the sick from the healthy. One of the other little boys in our room who was about Mariee’s age had a constant cough, runny nose and was sleepy all the time. His mom tried to bring him to the clinic, but they kept being sent back without getting care. I found out then that the clinic was only open during certain times, so if you were still in line when it was supposed to close, they sent you away without being seen and told you to come back another day.
Within a week at Dilley, it started to happen to Mariee. She got sick—first it was coughing and sneezing. I brought her to the clinic, where I waited in line with many other people in a large room like a gymnasium to get medical care for her. We were able to get in and see a physician’s assistant, who examined Mariee and said she had a respiratory infection. She gave her Tylenol, honey for her cough and told me to follow up in six months. [Translated transcript of Yazmin Juárez’s Congressional testimony, published on-line 11 July 2019, https://time.com/5624391/yazmin-juarez-migrant-mom-congressional-testimony/].
“We want them to come on the basis of merit”—President Trump, July 11, 2019—“we’re not in the hospital business; we’re in the border security business.” [More than 60% of those detained at the border “are held in privately-run immigrant prisons”—www.freedomforimmigrants.org]
—in each of us / to feel without being condemned, offered /
only a blanket and cement floor, chain-link / and no way out. /
I want to / write a beautiful poem, one that when people wandered /
in their sleep, they / would recite it, / tasting the words, like apricots, /
wandering into gardens at night / letting the wind curl around our /
bodies without air / only its fingers moving across us / soaking into us /
its long journeys carrying the scents of forests and deserts.
Map (D) describes “[F]ractional changes in tree vegetation cover at the end of twenty-first century for the a RCP4.5 and b RCP8.5 scenarios” [Lyra, A., Imbach, P., Rodriguez, D. et al. Climatic Change (2017) 141: 93]. [“The RCPs are consistent with a wide range of possible changes in future anthropogenic (i.e., human) greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and aim to represent their atmospheric concentrations.
RCP 2.6 assumes that global annual GHG emissions (measured in CO2-equivalents) peak between 2010–2020, with emissions declining substantially thereafter. Emissions in RCP 4.5 peak around 2040, then decline. In RCP 6, emissions peak around 2080, then decline. In RCP 8.5, emissions continue to rise throughout the 21st century” [Wikipedia entry for Representative Concentration Pathway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_Concentration_Pathway].
I want to write something as / beautiful as I remember / beauty to be /
coming upon a field of fireflies / a sea of phosphorescence, a canopy of orchids, /
a desert in bloom / everything we thought was gone, or disappearing, /
the rosette of foam where whales slipped back under, the frost /
on windows, steaming bread, someone singing / in an unknown language walking past /
our open windows, /the apparitions of trees, / belief our children remain, /
the air is not fire, the earth not water / the water not slurry, fire, hearth. /
Map (E) describes the change in vegetation cover at the end of twenty-first century for a RCP4.5 and b RCP8.5 scenario [Lyra, A., Imbach, P., Rodriguez, D. et al. Climatic Change (2017) 141: 93]. What we know as now a rich tropical rainforest, with diverse and often unique microclimates and specific species adapted to specific sites, will have disappeared. Hastened already by plantation economies—coffee, bananas, oils, fruit, cattle-grazing—it is probable, if not inescapable, our “civilization” will mysteriously disappear like many of the previous civilizations whose technologies outstripped the carrying capacity of the environment. Except that rather than mysteriously, we will have monitored our end, watched as we denied what we saw happening.
In the most beautiful poem I will put on the wind /
it will be as dark as night birds fly through / north to south and back again. /
In the most beautiful poem I will sing, as will you, what is wanting, /
wanted, / in the grass, so that we might learn again everything before we taught /
it all to be ours, to lay quiet / at our feet. / In the most beautiful poem, the words /
are not those we know, what is sung is / in voices we do not know yet. /
In the most beautiful poem / the air will be my brocade carrying fireflies / and moths. /
In the most beautiful poem / the trees will lace the horizon, clouds will germinate /
the canopies of flowers / in the most beautiful poem / I will be there /
but I will not be there as will you, / in the most beautiful poem we are moving /
into the shadows / cast by hummingbirds on their way back. /
___________
*Scientific American, July 11, 2019: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/drought-leaves-up-to- 2-8-million-hungry-in-central-america/ As many as 2.81 million people are struggling to feed themselves according to the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP).
†Todd Miller, Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration, and Homeland Security (City Lights Books, 2017), 94-6.
by way of the valley to Trevett Rd, we decided should leave before it was completely dark—
morning’s verge to edge
of
vernal
pools
still dark / song at the windows, rain was
at night at the window
morning verges / verging on light
up-reaching into
a tidal up-sweep
cerulean present hinged with memory’s edge
of song / concentric rings
from all over / bird song in the still-dark verge
spillage / spilling
spelling
into day
burst /day-burst
dandelion-burst
choric
verge / on the tongue’s ledge
slate-rock
water spills /pools / falls pinwheeled
columbine / morning
doves in the night spill/spell edge
into light
light’s verge edges into verdant
light edging maples /poplars / rows
of empires
the Great Lake’s deep musk
smell / spell /
ascendent into morning’s
spell-burst
burst into / light’s edge
spillages
across or the traverse of
circumferences / verges of darkness / cerulean
song / listening to you breathing—
Yesterday while standing under our cherry tree, delighting in the breeze, which was cleaning up after a small thundershower, a humming-bird—a delicate mite of a thing dropped down out of the wind and with that remarkable ease of poise and balance, proceeded to sip the honey from the columbine.
At once I unconsciously began to philosophize on the incident. My first thought was—what a delightful life-work was his—to merely sip honey from flowers. And second thought was: were allowed to sip nothing but honey would not its sweetness which we prize, eventually become sour and as gall to us?
Coming to my senses however I exclaimed as if in rebuke to my own thought. “But why spoil such a pretty scene with such aimless eulogizing.” And indeed why? What a scene painted—but could it be painted?
(Charles Burchfield, Journals, May 27, 1914)
choric cicada & frog in yellows & ochre ripple
across clouds
cross-hatched with the travels of crows, starlings, martins, martins skylarking
after heat-risen flies
everything builds structure, apparitional, & then
it’s there
a slash or two of off-black in the sky, purple as afternoon
light catches, echoing the base of thunder-
heads, the blown in
ruby-throated hummingbirds in East
Aurora, from the Yucatan or out
of the mouths of gods, like clouds of green and alizarin
to sip at honey-
suckle, columbine’s pinwheels
halo maples & pines,
the world never turns into anything but its own radiance
we suddenly see,
only after the work of attention, fields bobbing with brown seed combs, grasses
slash in afternoon currents of heat
& wind, swept up from the west, Erie, thin pan of water, lake
effects of light scattering into showers
refractions, the wind wavers in its own light, martins rise
higher as the field sings in heat
pulled from grass’s rhizomes netting the fields
with their unseen white lattice-
works, pines & maples darken
the far edge of fields, a gap, & a further field
ochres in the sun
sings, flint, shale, garnet burst quartzes & granites
deer tracks crease through grasses
shivering off morning rain
A vivid clear day sunlight white & blinding shadows are very sharp & dark blue black; dandelions hurt the eyes—
Shadows group into flat masses— Bare trees Blk V against north, fruit trees white against them
Poplar leaves vivid OY against sky, sparkle with white shimmer—
Evening sky is white surrounded by golden yellow—Sky is a rich, against it fresh green trees—yellow & green, fruit trees in full bloom—rich O sun—to east brick red obects—afterwards a rainbow horizon sky—
(Charles Burchfield, Journals, May 14 1917)
spores of light—
The sight of peach buds affects me in a manner I cannot quite describe—almost worshipful, as if I were in the presence of some divine miracle. And at the same time there is with is a certain nostalgic melancholy.
(Charles Burchfield, Journals, May 13, 1935)
filagree into trees
trees halo into clouds, we could be
all part of this
ongoingness, light patterning through the cherry tree
& viburnum
opulent /*op- for copious, plentiful
rich in its plentitudes
even as ten-
drilling clouds tumor onto the horizon (extinctions measuring the world
reductions & eliminations, weeding out & culling, spill over contagions & sacrifice zones
glypho— C3H8NO5P
—sate, never sated, forests retreating into memories—
dandelions puff-spores, burst in early spring, before mowers
& sprayers sweep through)
(CO2 levels at Mauna Loa 5/31: 424.65ppm; 5/30: 424.66ppm; 5/29: 424.76ppm; 5/28: 424.71ppm; 5/27: 424.56ppm—100ppm higher than when Charles Burchfield died on January 10, 1967 in West Seneca, NY, in Erie County, bisected by the slate rock Cazenovia Creek)
auroras on horizons, sheet lightning
all afternoon into evening clouds pull into themselves titanium white, musky creams
smudged brown shadows, we have forgotten
we are everyone, everything
moving moves
with us, & through us
our porosity, to be both nothing & line
soul & mountain & mist—
a waft of gnats, dragonflies, martins dive for them, the air
a cushion of heat swelling over fields—
then as I revise this, the fires north, across
Ontario, have dulled
the sky to a brown-rose
(AQI over 200, what does that mean? What infiltrates /
particulates / blood and lungs?)
the smell of particulates—maple and charcoal and diesel—drift
through the trees, a script for the days
ahead, as though the air
were a body and we have opened it
the matter
fine grained and glistening spilling—
Eventually headed for the road that connects Trevett & Townline Rds. Parked & ate lunch. The woods here still was not suitable and I drove on to the next one. Here I determined to stay. I had great difficulty choosing a subject but finally settled on a huge old hemlock. Encumbered as I was with my preconceived idea, I made many false starts; eventually I had to abandon the start & take a new sheet—By now I was beginning to see the true possibilities of the subject. I add a clump of red trillium to the scene—Even so I fumbled for a while longer—Eventually I got really started altho all the time I felt I was not producing anything good.
Worked until 6:30—then drove to Trevett Rd. and picked a bouquet of marsh marigolds, which I had noted earlier in the day. Then drove north to the scene of Tuesday’s sketch.
(Charles Burchfield, Journals, April 29, 1948)
concentric expansions, choric frogs & goldfinches
quadrants of light as the sun
moves over the pines
& crows begin their returns
to roosting trees
black light nesting
cardinals blaze bee—
lining into lilac thickets
star-coated
starlings in hedge-trees, scales
crescendo
toward evening, early
sunflowers in a garden not far off the road
where we stopped to watch
the end of the afternoon
the tea lukewarm now in the thermos
we lean against the car, warm, a sheen of dust from the gravel road—
has anyone driven on it today as it cuts
through a low hill, poplars
shadow the opposite side,
someone painted a boulder white
to mark their driveway to a sagging porch, upstate, western reaches,
the eastern Great Lakes, the wind comes off from, musty lake scent
a yellow-striped garden snake in the ditch measures
the afternoon’s heat,
its long belly registering the tremors
deep in the slate & limestone,
the underground rivers that up-pool, ponding
a kingfisher
may visit like a god searching her domain
About 6:00 we drove down into the country to see the moon (full tonight) rise over the Zoar Valley—(down via Rte 75 to Collins Center)
The country seemed especially beautiful, lit up by the declining sun—(a maple woods in particular
Arrived at the Big Woods about 7:00. We parked alongside it near the western end, facing east with a view over Zoar Valley.
We had planned to eat outside, but the southeast breeze had too much chill in it—So we ate our sandwiches, tea etc. in the car, watching the sunset in reverse, that is, on the eastern world as the light changed from yellow to gold, and then as the sun disappeared in the thickening mists, the warm light became more diffuse and mellow—of particular beauty were the various young trees with their pointed up-shooting branches, such as various kinds of poplars, young beeches, etc.
It was a delightful hour—robins could be [heard singing] robustly, crows kept up a continual raucous clatter in the darkening woods to the north. Peeper’s shrill chorus from woodland ponds.
Then, when the mellow afterglow was almost felt, rather than seen, the pale orange moon appeared in the thickening mists, already about the range of low hills beyond the valley.
As we intended going home by way of the valley to Trevett Rd, we decided should leave before it was completely dark—
(Charles Burchfield, Journals, April 26, 1964)
& then
who would not
the moon rose, near full
tree roots tremor, mycelium singing bio-
luminescence the garden
snake gone hunting in the grasses for crickets
who would not
poplars and locusts tower into the folded night
who would not
sing in this weather, on the tongue the song is always
there, in the eye radiant