Hurricane Harvey's Brag

I’m Hurricane Harvey. I’m the meanest motherfucker ever hit the Texas coast. I’m so bad they took my name off the list, just like the Boston Celtics hung up six when Bill Russell made the Hall of Fame. That’s how bad I am.

My mother was La Niña and my father was the Indian Ocean Dipole. I was born in the Antilles and blew up out of Campeche. I’ve been sub-tropical, super-tropical, extra-tropical. Every forty hours I burned down my eyewall and rebuilt it because I’m Hurricane Harvey and I pick supercells out of my teeth.

All you little people better run to high ground when you see me come to town. I stood up over Houston and pissed down for three straight days. By the second day, they had to add a new color to the map: Harvey purple. By the third day, they had to add another new color to the map: Harvey pink.

Yeah, that’s me, Hurricane Harvey, polychrome pisser, double-fisted drownpour! I’m so bad they put my name on the map, just like the conquistadors when you ruin a thing and then claim it’s yours. That’s how bad I am.

Books Available
The Day of My First Driving Lesson
Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable
High-Voltage Lines
Knocking from Inside

The Fujiwhara Effect

"When two hurricanes spinning in the same direction pass close enough to each other, they begin an intense dance around their common center. If one hurricane is a lot stronger than the other, the smaller one will orbit it and eventually come crashing into its vortex to be absorbed." - National Weather Service

I swirl a skirt of clouds. You bow.
I’m Anne of Austria, wearing lightning like a strand
of diamond studs. You’re Louis, the jealous king.
You circle behind me to count the gems
but I keep my face to you. Round and round we go
our ballroom, the whole Pacific Ocean.

Squall lines follow us, the whole sky entrained
into a great whirlpool, a spiral, a galaxy.
The Sun King’s court, thronged with courtiers
like lesser stars. Your followers and mine
stare and whisper while we revolve at arm’s length
in decaying orbit; closer and closer until we touch.

Only one will survive that meeting.

Books Available
The Day of My First Driving Lesson
Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable
High-Voltage Lines
Knocking from Inside

Thoughts on Greek letters

Health authorities have officially discontinued the practice of referring to new diseases or variants of diseases by place of origin. Instead, they will now use Greek letters. This is a good thing.

NOAA has said they will no longer use Greek letters to name hurricanes. If they get to the end of the alphabet, as happened last year, they will start over again from A. This is also a good thing.

Why?

Personification is a powerful human habit, and like most habits, it has upsides and downsides. The downside of the place-of-origin convention for diseases is that the disease becomes assocaited with its place of origin and the people who live there and were its first victims. It's a short step from there to blaming. The hateful slurs about the "China virus" and "kung flu" are still with us, and likely won't go away any time soon.

On the other hand, I saw very clearly that last year's late-season hurricanes with Greek-letter names simply weren't taken as seriously. Some of that was certainly disaster fatigue, as the Year Whose Name is Written on the Walls of Hell ground on and on through plague, wildfire, smoke, and floods. But I also strongly suspect that human-type names make the threat from a named storm seem just that little bit more real.

Anything that makes people take evacutaion warnings and threats more seriously...

Besides, if a Greek-letter-named storm happened to reach the threshold where a storm's name is usually retired - what then? Anyway, I am thinking about this as I'm about to post a couple of hurricane poems.

Books Available
The Day of My First Driving Lesson
Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable
High-Voltage Lines
Knocking from Inside

Reviewing poetry books

So apparently, it's a lot easier to get poetry book reviews published than it is to get poems or poetry collections published.

This is based on an extensive and scientific sample: to wit, three such reviews that I've written and submitted. All three were accepted and published - and quite quickly. Beginner's luck? I write really killer reviews? Or more likely, there just aren't as many people willing to write book reviews as there are trying to get poetry published?

My sober guess is, it's the last mentioned. So if you like poetry (and if you're reading this blog, that's a pretty good assumption), think about taking up reviewing. Generally the publishers will send you free copies of books to read and review.

Anyway - it's fun, it only has to take as much time as I let it, and it supports the poetry community. So. Here are links to two of the reviews, and also to the books reviewed, both courtesy of Terrapin Books.

Kissing the Long Face of the Greyhound, by Yvonne Zipter
review at The Compulsive Reader

The Curator's Notes, by Robin Rosen Chang
review at Mom Egg Review

The third review is one I wrote several years ago, for Mary Cresswell's book Fish Stories, published in an online journal called Zoetic Press. Zoetic Press has moved to a different website and I can't find the review there. I have a query in to them, and will update either with a link, or with the text of the original review.

Books Available
The Day of My First Driving Lesson
Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable
High-Voltage Lines
Knocking from Inside

Resilience II: Food Crops

For years, there has been concern expressed (in select quarters) about the lack of diversity in our food crops. This may not have been obvious to consumers in any one place, because improvements in transportation and refrigeration meant that eacn person had access to a wider variety of food crops than they would have had any time before - say - the Second World War. But globally, the number of food species and food families has been declinig steadily about as long as we have any good idea of what people ate.

This leads to brittleness in food supply. We've seen some examples: the potato blight in Ireland destroyed the crop, nationwide, because effectively all the potatoes in the country were genetically identical, and so the first blight that happened to be virulent against that genotype wreaked havoc. (It's important to note that the famine that followed the blight was at least partly created by the policies of the occupying government.) The Gros Michel used to be the market-dominant banana variety. It was almost compeltely wiped out by a plant virus and supplanted by the familiar Cavendish. I am not engaging in any argument about which is a "better" banana: the point is that the Cavendish will inevitably be decimated by a virus/fungs/whatever, because it too is a single genotype propagated vegetatively around the world. And in the lag time between the outbreak of the Cavendish-killer and the time that plantations of a new variety or varieties come into production, there will be a world-wide banana shortage. Doea anyone care if Jamba Juice runs out of smoothies? Maybe not - but consider the labor dislocations in banana-growing countries, leading to spreading poverty, political destabilization, and the mvoement of refugees. Also perhaps rapid conversion of intact or second-growth rainforest to new plantations, with the accompaying loss of ecological diversity and impact on climate change.

Myabe we've learned. Lately different varieties of bananas have been appearing in our supermarkets. Our best guess is that marketers are trying our different varieties to see which will be the most popular when - not if - the Cavendish is no longer viable. My hope is that banana marketing moves toward supporting a range of varieties as a normal business model: it makes sense, from their point of view, to spread the risk.

It's a peculiarity of banans taht they can only be propagated vegetatively. Most crops can be grown from seed, but that doesn't make them immune to the fate of the Gros Michel. Many crops now - for example, most of the maize grown in the US - are sterile-hybrid, meaning that the plants on farms are crosses between two varieties that can produce a vigorous offspring, but the offspring is itself sterile - think of it as the plane equivalent of a mule. This means farmers can't save some of their crop and use it to plant next year's fields, because the seeds are sterile. That not only means they have to go back to the store with cash every year, it means that crops can't evolve to fit the soil or weather conditions of an area, and the genetic diversity of these sterile hybrid crops is and remains extremely low.

There are some encouraging signs. Heirloom varieties of many crops have become popular both with home gardeners and with farms that cater to the high-end, slow-food restaurant trade. These are mostly open-pollinated, turning every farm into a small evolution lab. Locally, last year we ate a lot of apricots, but they all seemed to be of the same variety. This year, we've noticed at least four different varieties, all grown here in the Pacific Northwest.


On a slightly different note, have you seen how lately there's coconut in everything? I predicted at least 10 years ago that this would happen. Coconut is one of the few crops whose range is expanding: it thrives in hot weather and poor soils, and doesn't need a lot of water. We're also seeing other tropical crops, like mangoes and pineapples, appearing more often and in more different varieties. I'm expecting the next step to be grain crops that tolerate hot, dry conditions, like sorghum, millet, and perhaps teff. Modern maize requires huge amounts of water and fertilizer, but we may see a resurgence of older varieties native to the desert southwest (open-pollinated, yay!) that don't yield as high, but also don't fail if there's a heat wave. (Or as we call it now, a heat dome.)

Books Available
The Day of My First Driving Lesson
Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable
High-Voltage Lines
Knocking from Inside

Longest Day of the Year, 2021 Blues

Pulled the blackout curtains to keep out the morning sun
Couldn’t get to sleep all night for the sound of the rain-dance drums
Well, I thought I heard some fireworks and I thought I heard a gun.

Lost my job to the COVID, next thing I knew I was broke
Lost my health insurance and the welfare got revoked
Looked up for God in Heaven but the sky was full of smoke.

Looking for a Juneteenth party, wanna get some cherry pie
Looking down at the sidewalk, hot enough for an egg to fry
Listening to the “Walking Blues,” keep walking until I die.

Books Available
The Day of My First Driving Lesson
Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable
High-Voltage Lines
Knocking from Inside

Albino Redwood Sapling

Ghost treelet, filigree of ivory needles interlaced with your parent’s green, like baby fingers through mine; shade-lover, I see how you hide in the understory. Your pale head would scorch above the canopy.

Self-effacing does not decribe you: you are the sacrifice, you suck heavy metals from poisoned soil, sequester them in your creamy foliage. You feed parasitic from your parent's root. You grow stunted among towering siblings. All the other trees whisper and rustle:

what it is to be different, you who protect their offpsring from contamination, you, streak of white in deep shade, swan feather in a parrot’s breast, lesson in the unexpected, sermon on surprise.

Books Available
The Day of My First Driving Lesson
Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable
High-Voltage Lines
Knocking from Inside

More professional development...

So one thing I haven't done much of, the last few years, is submit to journals.

I had a good run of acceptances in 2017. Then events intervened, and I didn't have much fresh output or head space to put submissions together. I was also assmebling, editing, and submitting what would eventually become the chapbooks Country Well-Known and Driving Lesson, and the full-length Dervish Lions. Plus, my self-published pandemic/protest chapbook Bone Man.

With those projects behind me (Dervish is launching next month, I hope), and with the writing I've been doing over the last year, it was time to start pushing out submissions again. So, here goes...

Books Available
The Day of My First Driving Lesson
Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable
High-Voltage Lines
Knocking from Inside

Banjo Tussle

It’s a banjo tussle, a sonic joust,
a balloonist in a bassinet, a bison in a castle.
It’s a jello ballista, a chinless hellion,
the loneliest bastion on the coast.
It’s licentious, it’s abstentious, it jabs, it jibs,
it’s a tinsel blouse, a lichen house,
a hoist, a heist, a stolen stallion.
It enlists the silliest counsel; jettisons all ballast.
It jounces, bounces; jostles, bustles; hassles, hustles, haunts.
It’s a count on the hunt, a cellist on a jaunt
a billion blunt slices on a shuttle south
a jocose chant in a close coulee.
This is batshit elocution. Ah,
I just can’t lose the blues.

Books Available
The Day of My First Driving Lesson
Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable
High-Voltage Lines
Knocking from Inside

Steganographic Poem After a Haiku by Basho

From nine PM we waited, knowing it was not yet
time for the eclipse
to start.

Time hung heavy on our hands, heavy as
the unfortunately manifesting
clouds above.

Give way, cumulus, you’re opaque, obscure, at
rest or in motion,
to us

the intended observers of this celestial event, this
moon-veiling, we would-be
beholders.

Books Available
The Day of My First Driving Lesson
Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable
High-Voltage Lines
Knocking from Inside

Half-Remains

How did I come to be half woman and
half shadow? My left side, a charcoal sketch,
a figure motion-stopped, an outline etched
on solid concrete. Look how my right hand

still moves. My right leg walks, or would, except
there is no place that I’d be walking to
where half a woman could be made anew
a place where spare left sides are somehow kept?

I have one eye, one ear, and half a tongue.
My right hand’s flesh and bone. My left is ash.
All I remember is a sudden flash—
a flash far brighter than a thousand suns.

Books Available
The Day of My First Driving Lesson
Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable
High-Voltage Lines
Knocking from Inside

The Rosebush Advises Me How to Survive

Cut your losses. Let the blossoms go,
the shrivelled leaves, the desiccated stems
and save your strength to save the roots below.

The wind will shred a branch each time it blows,
both leaves and flowers thrown to kingdom come
so cut your losses, let the blossoms go.

The sky’s on fire with heat, and stricken crows
fall in the street, black iridescent gems
so save your strength to save the roots below.

The sky has turned to ice, the air to snow
and widowed summer weeps in tattered hems
so cut your losses, let the blossoms go.

What thunder-strike destroyed, I will regrow.
I can replace what’s lost to raging flame.
I’ve saved my strength to save the roots below.

My thorns will teach you what a fish should know:
the ice won’t reach the bottom of the stream.
Just cut your losses, let the blossoms go
and save your strength to save the roots below.

Books Available
The Day of My First Driving Lesson
Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable
High-Voltage Lines
Knocking from Inside

About the heat dome...

Yeah. That's how it was.

In case you didn't notice, this poem follows the same form as "Windward Shore Surf," but the content is kind of opposite. Shout out to Alberto Rios for his craft tip "The Poem's Other" in Diane Lockward's "The Crafty Poet II." I think it would be cool to publish them as a pair - maybe on facing pages, with one left justified and one right justified.

Books Available
The Day of My First Driving Lesson
Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable
High-Voltage Lines
Knocking from Inside

Heat Dome

 

It whispers. It slithers. It’s a night-flight of bloodsuckers, sudden-death black bats

It scorches. It sizzles. Insinuates drought; it’s a shifter and slider, mercury riding to an all-time high

It’ll burn dust to ashes, crush ashes to dust. Fry a dog on the sidewalk. It’s a stalker that withers the rose on the stalk

You feel the burn and the blister, the gasp of high pressure under a cast-iron pot lid, a Dutch oven stovetop simmer

It’ll dry you and drag you, buckle and crack the road under your feet

It’ll hold you and hurt you, drive red pins and needles under your nails, make you beg for relief

Drives red-and-white flashers seeking the stricken in some hellscape by Bosch

Oh, it’ll stroke you and choke you, this dome on the rock of the Anthropocene Age – it’s a steel-taloned dragon coiled on top of the breathlessly burning sky.

 

Books Available
The Day of My First Driving Lesson
Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable
High-Voltage Lines
Knocking from Inside

Resilience

This may be the most important thing I’ll ever talk about.

I’ve been thinking about it for a while. In the fall of 2018 I did some intensive reflection, which resulted in a page and half or so of notes that I saved and put aside. Then came 2019, closely followed by the Year Whose Name is Written on the Walls of Hell. If nothing else, 2020 certainly brought resilience to the forefront of a lot of people’s thinking.

There are some risks with that. First, that it becomes just a buzzword, a form of advertising. Second, what I’m seeing is an almost-exclusive emphasis on individual resilience – mental and emotional. I’m not denying that that’s important, but I think we also and more importantly need to talk about community and system resilience.

Why? Because, fundamentally, humans do not live as individuals. We all live embedded within communities, cultures, societies, and nations. Love it or hate it, that’s reality. We need other people in order to survive; we need sustained and sustainable infrastructure to communicate.

Also, because any time we focus solely on individual traits and behaviors, we risk blaming people for things that are actually out of their control. You collapsed under the strain of COVID? It’s your fault for not being resilient enough: never mind that you lost your job and your health insurance because your employer’s business went under, you were struggling to care for a sick relative or significant other, you were grieving (fill in a number) of friends and loved ones who were dead or dying and there was no-one to help.

Do the systems we live within – communities, cultures, societies, and nations –promote and nurture the individual traits that contribute to resilience? Or stifle and discourage those traits? Do they impose burdens that are already a standing cost to our resilience, that we simply don’t notice when times are not so hard? Or do they offer resources that can supplement our natural resiliences, at need?

Even beyond the properties of systems as they affect individuals, we need to talk about the resilience (or lack thereof) of systems themselves. It’s helpful to have an antonym: a good antonym for resilience is brittleness.

It’s also really helpful to have examples.

Brittleness: The Suez Canal blockage had a huge worldwide economic impact, for the actually just a few days that it lasted, and for being a very local event in itself. It’s instructive, not only because the Suez is a classic chokepoint, but because transportation experts worldwide had been warning that such an event was becoming increasingly likely. Container ships having been getting steadily bigger, average size, and the newest and biggest just have no margin of error for maneuvering in the tight quarters of the Suez.

(I’m not claiming prophetic abilities here. This is all stuff I read during and after the event.)

A further consequence of the growth in ship size is that fewer ports can accommodate these larger ships. Retrofitting a port for larger ships is prohibitively expensive, which means the larger the ship, the fewer places it can go. While the larger ships may be more economical per mile per unit cargo, they will also have to travel farther on average – and – the goods being offloaded will have to travel further to reach their point of sale. Goods bound for Portland on a super-ship will most likely have to offload in Seattle and be trucked or railed to retailers here (this is already true: even a couple of decades ago, Port of Portland could not accommodate the then largest ships).

What if Seattle is disabled by a natural disaster or, God forbid, an act of war or terrorism? The next closest is… Vancouver BC? Across an international border? Or San Francisco – and have you ever driven or taken a train between Portland and the Bay Area?

So, end to end, it’s not at all clear that the larger ships save time, money, or fuel for everyone. Only for the shippers themselves. And meanwhile, we lose redundancy; we create more chokepoints like the Suez (I wonder about the Panama Canal); we lose resilience on a global level.

Another example of brittleness: Texas power grid, ‘nuff said.

What are some good examples? Here’s one that paid off more than the originators ever thought it would: Portland’s beloved food carts. The legislation that made them possible was not put in place with the idea that we would someday have a global pandemic that would put a hard stop on indoor dining – but when the pandemic came, there they were, feeding folks and keeping people employed. I predict the hospitality industry in Portland will rebound faster than in many other cities. We have a big reservoir of talented food creators in the carts, some of whom will make the jump to brick and mortar restaurants when the time comes. At least one Portland favorite closed its restaurant and promptly turned around and opened a food cart: I fully expect to see Bistro Montage back in a building within a year or so.

Another example, Portland Bureau of Transportation (full disclosure, I volunteer on an advisory committee for PBOT, but they don’t pay me anything) is rebuilding the Burnside Bridge to seismic codes. If we have a major earthquake (and we’re overdue for one), the BB is intended to be the lifeline between the east and west halves of the city. Now make no mistake, one bridge is not going to be enough – but it’s going to be hella better than not having any bridges.

Related to that, Portland is about to get its first ferry. Really, it’s ridiculous that we have this great river running through the city (TWO great rivers if you count the Columbia), and we treat it as a barrier. What if we think of it as a way to get somewhere? It’s only since we equate “travel” with “automobile” that we don’t think of rivers as avenues of commerce and travel. A river can be an asset, not a liability.

(I’ve wanted a ferry for Portland ever since I was in Vancouver and saw how casually people hop on the ferry to get back and forth from downtown to the North Shore. Also on that trip, I got a look at some of the many ferries plying Puget Sound in multiple directions. I came home and bent everyone’s ear whom I could get to hold still about Why don’t we have a ferry?)

So the Frog Ferry is going to run from a location on the east bank north of downtown to the west bank in downtown. My hope is that more sites are added, and the ferry line becomes like a zipper, stitching back and forth across the Willamette. Clearly, this reduces our dependence on bridges. (Currently the plan is that the ferry will not carry auto traffic: pedestrians including mobility devices, bikes, and scooters.)

Another example: Years ago, the law made it basically impossible to have a mural on a building other than a private residence, because it was considered to be a billboard, and Clear Channel had a monopoly on billboards. I think they still pretty much do. City lawmakers figured out a way around it. Now Portland has some of the most street art per capita – soory, that’s extremely clumsy phrasing, I’m trying to avoud saying we have the best street art around. But there certainly is more street art than in most other cities I’ve seen, and while some of it is mediocre, some of it is outstanding.

It’s also a much more democratic art form than most public art. The materials cost to create a street mural is way lower than to put up a statue or build a fountain. We have municipal and regional programs that give small grants for this sort of thing, but also, many are just created by individuals who come to an agreement with the building owner.

I see some principles emerging.

Redundancy. Antonym: chokepoints. See Suez Canal.

Multiple transport modes. Antonym: Automobile and road dependency. See Frog Ferry.

Low entry barriers. See food carts and street murals. Antonym, I’m not sure exactly, but high capital costs would be a big piece.

Clearly there's a lot more to think about here. Watch this space as I learn more...

Books Available
The Day of My First Driving Lesson
Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable
High-Voltage Lines
Knocking from Inside

Killer heat wave

No joke. Termperatures in Portland set records, then knocked them down, for three successive days, ending with the all-time high of 115 yesterday at 5 PM. There were hundreds of calls and clinic visits related to heat, and at least a few deaths - possibly including a pair of swimmers missing and presumed drowned.

On Sunday we set up our new AC, which was a life saver. At the same time, it occurred to me that I do have a perfectly good air-conditioned office with my name on it: I just haven't used it since March 2020. So I spent yesterday working in the building that has been my workplace since 2001 - except for this last year.

Sunday afternoon, Todd brought me and the big monitors and the monitor stand here so that I could re-set-up my office. It was very weird to walk into my office and see my 2019-20 calendars and everything exactly the way I left it when everything went to hell. I took down the calendars and recycled them before I even tried to do anything else: it was a form of renewal, I suppose.

Then I left to take the bus home at about 3 PM. It was windy down by the Rose Quarter - it always is - but the wind was HOT. It felt like air coming out of a furnace.

Heat like that demands your attention. It was, not exactly invigorating, but it made me strangely alert and focused. I think it was the extra attention needed to move efficiently, not waste energy, and not touch anything, especially metal. I also found myself watching a block ahead to see which side of the street was shadier.

And then yesterday: even hotter. I got up early and caught the bus, and even at 7:30 in the morning, it was hot. All the vegetation looks heat-blasted, except for the quinces which seem completely impervious to any kind of weather. The roses on my rosebush dried in place - though I expect the bush itself is fine, it has deep roots. Scorched leaves on most of the trees. Todd picked me up and brought me home at about 5 PM, just as PDX was notching the all-time high. We holed up with the AC.

By 8 PM, marine air was starting to move in and temperatures fell precipitately. It got down into the 60s overnight, though it's forcast to get back up over 90 today.

There will be more of this.

Books Available
The Day of My First Driving Lesson
Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable
High-Voltage Lines
Knocking from Inside

Big Sky, Small Sky

I used to seek out the big-sky spaces,
windswept ridges, raven-haunted cliffs,
highways lined with juniper and sage
but COVID taught me to look close
at four bushes of lavender and a patch of mint.
Just now sunlight is falling through the stems,
picking out the nodding purple blossoms
and half a dozen honeybees, humming, placid enough to stroke,
not minding when I rub the leaves to fill
the morning air with fragrance – and at the corner of the path
the handful of spearmint I transplanted last summer
has grown to a knee-high jungle that my husband harvests
for pesto, lemonade, and after-dinner juleps.
I don’t begrudge the crows their raucous freedom. I’m grateful
for the quiet company of bees.

Books Available
The Day of My First Driving Lesson
Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable
High-Voltage Lines
Knocking from Inside

Windward Shore Surf

It hammers. It hollers. It’s a rage of white tigers, a pack on the hunt

It gouges. It grinds. Strips sand from the shoreline and flesh from your bones

Your feet feel the shred and the suck, crest-curl-undertow, shaking the breakwater

It rips a rip-tide all along the coast, boat-tosser, slam bang, spurts from the clifftop like spouting whales

Makes opihi pickers run for their lives

It’ll drag you and drown you, shake, shatter and roll you

It throws spindrift half a mile inland, salt-glaze your windshield, lick your lips and taste it

It’ll chew you and spit you, slap you and hit you, sing about tradewinds and batter you to bits

It’s a shouter, a braggart, a wall of green thunder, a stone-splitting giant with black sand for teeth

A wind-driven, moon-hooked, gnasher at the world’s edge, a brass band Hallelujah in the world’s biggest church.

 

 Books Available
The Day of My First Driving Lesson
Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable
High-Voltage Lines
Knocking from Inside