2 poems
JURUPA OAK
Like a levitating welcome sign
like rain
like the ice which once
carved these rocks
now painted over
with cement dust
we find our pullulation
at an extraordinarily low
and dry site for the species,
in the always cracking
mirror: unremarkable
but remarkably
alive.
This tree has been
forever these, a relict
of a vanished vegetation
community, a plural
tending, to indicate
as present, near.
In the underbrush,
the If inside of
unforgetting dilates,
about to follow.
The Pleistocene
made a pact. Year
after year, the years
fall backwards into this gully
on a scarred suburban
hillside, where only a single clone
survives. An errant bell
in granite shadow
chimes. A prickly leaf,
waxy, dark and green,
rubs a bit of its afterlife
across my arm. On the highway
in the distance, our vaporous
abandon swirls.
Technically I’m trespassing
on the relatively recent
concept of property
to be here: a disjunct
distribution. We take our names
from what we steal, opposed
to that, coiling. Time
exhales in brittle unison
on this north-facing slope
above Jurupa Valley,
incorporated 2011, formerly
part of Riverside, formerly
Mexican land grant, formerly
the territory of the people
called Gabrieleño
by their colonizers,
formerly formed
by glaciers. To gather
the ghosts of that no longer,
the hummingbird plucks
the air apart from era.
The Jurupa Oak,
an isolated occurrence,
is more than 12,000 years
older than California.
It gives birth to itself
again and again, sending up
new shoots whenever
fire consumes a stem.
Less than a mile away,
what remains of Crestmore Quarry,
last operated by TXI Riverside
Cement. The company knew
that fugitive emissions
from the dust piles were spreading.
The machinery
shaves away the consciousness.
“We always say there’s all this
junk in the air, it comes
from the air, but we never say
where the air comes from.”
For over a hundred years,
the intermittent howling
chewed apart the mountain’s bones,
spitting out capital: limestone,
blue calcite, quartz, and
ambient quantities of hexavalent
chromium, a potent carcinogen.
The plant shut down in 2015.
Quietly, like the snow,
poisonous or otherwise,
that no longer falls here,
the wind, diaphanous
conductor, shakes the branches
but not the individual leaves.
The musicians contort their bodies
around their instruments,
frozen in mid-air,
to make them sing.
The leaves flicker, strum
the sky’s face – polyphonic –
across from where I sift
these wayward syllables.
A rattlesnake wakes
the animal inside me.
I wait until my fear
is covered with leaves,
the dusty eyes that refuse
to close, that survive
by ripening into selves.
Little flecks of pyrite
lodge themselves
in my fingers and I think
maybe this is writing.
A language from underground
brushes up against me,
leaving behind
its dim echoes.
At the bottom of the hill,
the illegal dump:
A partially digested
box spring, a busted copper
doorknob, a birdhouse
where perhaps a bird,
whose name drops
like feathers from its body,
still, at least intermittently,
alongside scattered nails
and rubber hoses,
finds a bit of respite.
And in the direction of town,
the almost identical houses,
crouching, squinting
up at the sun.
I take the doorknob
with me, its metal guts
exposed, the bruise
inflicted by the hammer.
It rattles around in my car
and consciousness. I try
to open the door
it once locked, the errant
seed that sprouted
into what was once
a whole community.
I think of the air
so choked with heat
and thirst and what it means
to survive. Somehow,
we learn to live by the flame
that strips the bark away.
We send out little tendrils
from a brokenness that burns.
References:
May MR, Provance MC, Sanders AC, Ellstrand NC, Ross-Ibarra J (2009) A Pleistocene Clone of
Palmer's Oak Persisting in Southern California. PLoS ONE 4(12): e8346.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0008346
Wilson, Janet. “Living with the white dust from a cement factory,” Los Angeles Times, 16 July 2008.
State of California Department of Justice. “Brown Sues Cement Plant for Hexavalent Chromium Exposure,” 3 July 2008. https://www.oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/brown-sues-cement-plant-hexavalent- chromium-exposure.
MESHWORK
A heron landed
in the shallows
of my notebook
as I was trying
to drag a poem
out of the water.
The passengers
were clapping
in relief, in
gratitude, for the
pilot’s skill, for
the familiar hand
of gravity.
I walked into the
forest. I walked
into a net of spun
silences. A soft
geometry
snapped as I
moved through it,
sticking to my
forehead
and my fingers.
A noise
got bent
when I pulled it
from my mouth.
I smoothed it out
and strung it up
with the others,
a wire of not-words
hanging in the air
between
my human body
and my forest body.
The not-words
said nothing
about the forms
that rose up
all around me.
Occasionally
a vowel
would fall
from a branch
and settle
on a not-word.
Occasionally
a consonant
would crawl
out of the ground.
Brent Armendinger’s most recent book is Street Gloss, a hybrid work of site-specific poetry and experimental translation, featuring Argentinian writers Alejandro Méndez, Mercedes Roffé, Fabián Casas, Néstor Perlongher, and Diana Bellessi (The Operating System, 2019). He is also the author of The Ghost in Us Was Multiplying (Noemi Press, 2015), a finalist for the California Book Award in Poetry, and two chapbooks, Undetectable (New Michigan Press) and Archipelago (Noemi Press). Brent teaches creative writing at Pitzer College and lives in Los Angeles. His website is brentarmendinger.com.