5 poems
from Ark
The Charlottes Hold Their Breath
Enter from the right:
Politics. Meaning?
People taking advantage,
people blocking people from taking advantage,
limited resources,
symbols standing for limited resources,
whole bags of heavy symbols with a dollar sign painted on
gathered at the neck by pullstrings
so they don't empty out.
Symbols are very mysterious, say
the three Charlottes wearing
diaphanous gowns, the kind the lady wears
to herald the beginning of a film.
The Charlottes curtsey.
This is where the mysterious mechanical device appears –
or is it just augmented reality? The history boat, both relying on Now
and maybe some factoids, floats up on real waves
for forty days more.
You've got the last lemon
you tell the Charlottes,
scurvy to follow. Not scurvy says a Charlotte,
cholera first, then scurvy.
O wash your hands in those waves,
hot water full of plankton and fish
droppings and
saliva from the bottom of the Coke bottle
and a skim of oil
from leaky Roman amphora and
Exxon, and gull feathers,
their mites, and a bloom of algae
you might want to hold.
The Charlottes are not
the girls on dimes,
or painted by Delacroix, nipples hard, leaning forward in the boat,
or hefty, bearing a torch in river traffic,
or pink-hatted, kids at the knees –
they act.
Enter the Charlottes
who scatter out of the wings,
then whoosh, pigeon-like,
dropping feathers that enter
the windpipes of the rest of us afraid of
too-cute Politics
whose flight
is so familiar
it could be air.
It's the Charlottes who recognize
Death,
the one guy who keeps it open
past the end of the month.
Recognize, like in the U.N.
And you? You're staring at the waves'
hypnotic up/down.
The smell of dying is ambergis
(bile ducts in whales
that ease stuck food) to the scent of life.
“If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention.”
– Heather Heyer.
Who wants to be the posthumous
heroine? ask the Charlottes,
the stink of fate
wafting from the bilge.
Charlottesville, the movie, rolls.
Captive Portals
A recording of the artist's body slamming against the walls and floors of an echoing empty space
Search string: autonomous car window
A video of a plastic bag half-filled with water, with a little machine making the bag pound a closed door
A video about the change from switchboard to moodboard
#carework/labor change/capitalization of emotion: Mom
Orange extension cord poster over the orange couch and a big plug
Not to mention the fact that your data will live on on hardware out of your control
Child Washed Up Onshore
I brought out a dove, setting it free.
Off went the dove but then it returned.
No perch was open yet it circled back to me.
I brought out a swallow, setting it free.
Off went the swallow but then it returned.
No perch was open yet it circled back to me.
I brought out a raven, setting it free.
Off went the raven and it saw the waters receding.
It was eating, bobbing up and down; it did not come back to me.
Crossing the Aegean
Once a sea turtle faced me in a wave I rode in a 9-foot sailboat.
Nice, I screamed. Let me out of here.
I can't look at the photo: refugees in clothing I wear.
A boat that small?
You watch your children die of thirst, the watching part way too slow.
Or all the blood seeps out, pierced by lead not really even aimed at them.
All the blood is a lot. It pumps hard. The eyes empty of meaning at about the same rate.
See the video of the dying protester. Actors close their eyes--they can't get that part right.
Forty percent of you are university-educated and such a vessel is promise.
You put your children onboard without you. They cry. An Afghan boy gets trampled to death.
Anti-Islam “Identitarians” crowdfund to pay for vessels to chase and sink the boats.
Four days sometimes to cross the Aegean. It should take 3 hours.
Ark Report: 150 – 200 Species Go Extinct Every Day
I.
You see edelweiss but no animals:
It takes a while to “see” with so few in “real life,”
a squirrel, a lone gull fighting plastic six-pack rings.
1,000 times the “natural” or “background” rate of extinction,
the greatest since the dinosaurs' exit.
Putting aside diversity.
No one shuffle of lost genes better than another, none more authentic.
Just saying.
We must animal our lives appropriately.
Two by two, LGBTTQQIAAP, can we dance it?
From Africa we come, unto Africa we return
to see the South as empty
except for oil, uranium and the metals of computer,
land that must be “free” of all animals,
including human.
II.
Water is carbon at the molecular level,
every gnat carbon too.
How a cloud's shade introduces
the notion of carbon downpour
plus
possible extinction.
You hear the connivers assembling before the first drop.
All aboard!
Rhetoric that refuses forgetting, should also accuse.
You build it, they will come.
III.
The Exit Theories:
IV.
Corporations sing irresponsibility, no boat at all.
A module (space?) bobs in the waves like
Yes, you're not going to be left behind.
Fierce, the winds at those waves.
No sci-fi fathoms-deeps the premise for what it is,
a single drop teeming, ready to drop,
with no sequel to scud along,
ready for alligators thirty feet long to find muck to rise from.
All the darlings stay killed in VR.
V.
You are seated and belted.
Are we there yet?
The future, no, the furniture
is terrifying in its construction:
no plan, no clue, no user interface.
You press Doom and lo!
a bunny pops out,
tricked into the box
by limited neurons.
Fishing off the side, the next species as edible as you,
the worm waiting,
you scream when its mouth opens wide.
Unnatural, but who's to judge.
You're sure chickens in their cages say your name,
tiptoeing as they do, on their claws,
necks ricocheting in the air.
They evoke paranoia and silence.
On a boat this size, silence
is seldom. A movie once in a while,
with tense scenes. Instead, the smell
of ammonia, the unstoppable urine.
VI.
Climb a tree. (You've never climbed anything,
you've never even considered climbing --
the boughs, the height, what tree?)
With the wave poised high as Thailand's,
two-ton cars confetti,
you take to the streets, flaneur-of-flood,
and the struggle you observe is not evil,
it's entropy: that mud, soon washed and clean.
Hail! is what the wave signals, ALL new! real estate,
overwhelming the cry of those
to be rescued, unnoticed, unclaimed, unless later,
in a box to be revered in church sacristies,
their fate changed to good as a result of a change of location.
If you surround the subject with urgency
(the bear on ice, small ice)
If you remove the safety
(the horse, rearing)
If you take the animal from its mother
(Eve looks and looks)
VII.
You build a sandwich, not an ark.
The hair you bleach turns whiter at night,
in exclamation. Does anyone play
I'm responsible with a bottle?
Quite a lot of name-calling.
Water reaches your neck, bubbles
break in your bloodstream,
a dog puts his head out the window for air
and gets it chopped off.
You don't swim or at least not that far.
Your life vest is lead. No guns are damaged
in the production of this FEMA situation,
except by submersion, big waves
that suck them down with the rabbit,
that trick to rid us of
the automatic, weapon or exit,
sluiced together so weather can win instead
of ourselves, in slaughter.
But there I am again – we. The water's a we:
all those drops. The doubled animals are gone
as the last little pig runs down the beach
weee, weee, weee, weee, but not home.
Terese Svoboda is the author of 19 books of poetry, fiction, memoir, biography and translation, and has won a Guggenheim, the Bobst Prize for fiction, the Iowa Prize for poetry, an NEH and a PEN/Columbia grant for translation, the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, a Jerome Foundation prize for video, the O. Henry award for the short story, two Appleman awards, and a Pushcart Prize for the essay. She is also a three time winner of the NY Foundation for the Arts fellowship, and has been awarded Headlands, James Merrill, Hawthornden, Bogliasco, Yaddo, MacDowell, Hermitage and Bellagio residencies. She wrote the libretto for WET, an opera that premiered at L.A.'s RedCat Theater, Disney Hall.