It has been a while since I posted poems on this blog.  In fact, those posted today date from Spring 2014, already four years ago.  I had just read Elizabeth Kolbert's unnerving The Sixth Extinction, making extensive notes as I read.  The first longish poem "The Bottom of the Sixth . . ." in this post is based on those notes along with my continuing encounter with Veronica, the character from the earlier "Prairie Elegy."  

As with that one, any number of phrases and tropes are purloined from some of my favorite folk-rock and Americana artists.  As with "Prairie Elegy" a Discography follows.  

The Bottom of the Sixth allusion derives from my fondness for baseball. Readers who remember Philip Roth's The Great American Novel may recognize the reference to Terra Incognita.

(There are two earlier shorter "Bottom of the Sixth" poems, which somehow provided an avenue to the longer one, following.)

"Prairie Elegy" still follows today's post, as far as I can tell.  If not, select 2016 in the right side margin if my tales of Veronica amuse you.

The Bottom of the Sixth in Terra Incognita

The gentlest of taps on a tired shoulder & then

my broken heart misses its best shot at killing

me expediently. Baseball in Terra Incognita

always a dubious proposition and it seems

like only me and the players and tired old

timers with rheumy eyes who can’t see

too good anymore and maybe haven’t

even in salad days when they never ate

salad anyway. Just the beasts of the field they

subdued by killing them. Unimpeachably, one

way to do it. I was there to see the Rupert Mundys.

I remember them Mundys, Veronica announced

unannounced. I emerged astonished beholding  

heaven and earth as never quite before.

What in heaven and earth was SHE doing there?  

Hadn’t she dumped me at the Bison Paddock? 

She said she thought she might find me there

where the buffalo used to roam. She was the kind

of girl who could say things that weren’t that funny.

She could be a bit of a coyote, skin the honey

hue those imminent Sioux wore emanating up (and down)

in quest of their few remaining bison. 

She even had a bow to slay the umpire when the call

went wrong. As it inevitably would. But killing

messengers is release and not reward and now

they have instant replay in Terra Incognita anyway.

Besides, they just might have been looking for us.

We weren’t much of anywhere but the end of the road

near Dinosaur on US 40 where Phil Roth Field casts

its luminous glow. When the PA played God

Bless Vespucciland it seemed like a good time

to go, it wasn’t that great a game anyway

and she had made an already sumptuous camp. 

She used to tell me scrumptiously sounding things

and so I had remained a sucker for her & her

kind, firesigns and all. There was her tent and she

told me I could sleep in the bathos of my dreams.

It still was tied in the seventh we later learned.

But O! the bath I took in the end. It reminded me

of what I remembered from Bab edh-Dhra.

Reminded me of what can happen in the morning.

In the morning we went looking for the frogs

that won’t outlive us. Boys throw stones

at frogs in sport she reminded me but

the frogs die in earnest. I never threw stones at any

old frog and couldn’t hit the broadside

of a barn anyway, I told her in adamant retreat. 

And that time you barbecued their tiny legs on

Pheasant Ave. NW? What rose from those ashes?

A taste for flesh and fire, I suppose. As usual

she had me and all I could remember were those

haunches of Buffalo we would never taste again.

She wasn’t going to leave me. She wasn’t going

to leave me alone. It made for certain difficulties.

We agreed to let Bion and his cynical diatribes be bygones.

She built a fire and told me about Homo

diluvii testis who witnessed the Flood

as a salamander. I thought we had won

the war with the Newts. But Froggy went a’Courtin’

& Molly Mouse was the hat check girl, and we

hung our hats on desiccated Pinyon boughs and hoped

the fruit would not fall too far from our tree. 

The great serpent in the sky spoke with a tongue

just as forked as The Great White Father’s. Promised us

the land, the vista, and assorted ancestral

properties. It was all as confused as what I

learned in school. She seemed secure enough

in the facts of the matter. We had only begun.

She taught me a saying: camels often sit down

carefully, perhaps their joints crack. I do and mine did

so it seemed a wise saying if only from some Terra

Lingua Incognita. Then we got down to

a terrifying taxonomy. She insisted, I say,

she insisted, I was the last megatherium. 

I ain’t one of them Camelids! I cried. I protest!

Them are those pigs and hippopotami,

them deer and giraffes and cattle. 

Them goats and antelope. Look! In Big Wide

Wonderful Wyoming they call the pronghorn

goats but that’s not what they are. Not taxonomically. 

They’re not even antelope! Not taxonomically! 

I’d never been so shocked. She used to love me a lot.

And only because I was the last of the megatheria?

So there we lay, melodizing laylike on

the lay of the land and the lines it drew before our

weary aging eyes. Not much to go on

is there? she reminded me and then

I had to micturate. OK, go ahead, piss on it,

she taunted me. You don’t know squat and don’t have to either.

Not my fault, not my fault, I continued in protest.

I didn’t punch them doggies. Or them megatheriums.

You do squat to shit, don’t you? she continued. 

Each of ours will all but certainly bear careful

examination by the planet’s next species’

analog for anthropologists a few hundred

million solar rotations hence, she foresaw forcefully.

Dig it. You know it will and so will they.

Old roads are built on old rivers, it occurred to me,

and that maybe she was getting a little big

for her very attractive Venus Project hemp britches.

Maybe even backtalk will soon be proscribed

here in the ever-later Anthropocene?

Lord make me an instrument of her piece I pled. 

Besides, I’d just been fifteen days under the hood.

You ever tried that? Ever talked to trilobites,

belemites & ammonites the size of wagon wheels?

No way to leave her company, seeking outsized bones

 . . . seeking the strength of her line . . .

seeking that which only Wonmug and Bloom might have. 

Requisition Lewis, Clark, and Sacajawea,

and steal their orders? Go in our own skins to find incognita?

Roam the forests aboriginal, unexplored and undisturbed? 

Assume the aspect of le Mayne, traverse the Ohio?

Dragoon some Algonquin and Iroquois, beat Jefferson &

Lewis & Clark to the Devil’s Punchbowl.

See what we might learn about espèces perdues?

Get our kicks in Big Bone Lick? Wouldn’t that be

a dose of sweet satiety. Stand up as Oop did

to Wonmug and Bloom in the eternal

machine of time. Lavish our care on trace fossils

left by the Little People who exterminated

the dangerous Witch Buffalo with horns sticking

straight from her forehead, all for the cause

of Paleontology in Kentucky, fueled on 

Bourbon demonic as Barbados rum. 

Better to drink instead from the lees of

Cuvier’s cuvee of extinction. It hurts down here

‘cause we’re running out of beer but

we’re all gonna die someday? Aren’t we all

after all, “capable of violent tremors

& eruptions”? Don’t we all want to pop

up in Paris like a mushroom? I certainly do!

Not me she replied, artfully tart as fine hard cider. 

She confessed to preferring Florence. Always had

a thing for Florentines. She was lovely

as the Lily of the West and I feared her

betrayal. Maybe you want to talk about

Proboscidea? she went on, predatory

glint in her amber eye. Maybe you want to see

l’animal moyen de Montmartre?

Get it on over transformisme v. evolution,

see Lamarck as our missing spiritual link,

feel the Beagle upon us like the direct

revelation of a higher power much as

Alfred Newman did? Not everything is impossible,

she went on. Not everything is

“an affair as unlikely as levitation.”

Things got scary after that. She told me about

the tests of the Foraminifera. They look like

beehives, braids, bubbles, clusters of grapes, and

beaded earrings of the sort Chris makes.

Alvarez examined his from Gola de Bettoccione,

and he for one knew his uniformatarianism.

Knew his ammonites & rudist bivalves. 

Even the quartz was shocked. And then there was

the Crater of Doom, and the fern spike and the

Strangelovian Ocean. The Nautili, the chambered ones,

(we’re all gonna die someday as Kasey might sing).

Building a more stately mansion for either

of our souls seemed about as far-fetched as

the Midianites there in the Crater of Doom.

There in Chicxulub, coinciding perfectly with

the boundary between the Cretaceous and

the Paleogene when and where non-avian

dinosaurs suffered hundred percent losses

as did the terrestrial Enanthiornithine &

the aquatic Hesperornithine birds.

Then and there at the bottom of the fifth.  

The very thought brought sadness to my heart, as though we

might not ever stretch for a seventh, hoping

against dubious hope, even willing to settle

for a date with the devil himself, push the old Nick

over the precipice like the pious shepherd

at Dob’s Linn. Disregard the signs of mismatch

for as long as we might until we encounter

for our very own selves the “My God” reaction

as the paradigms suddenly shift and the ground

we could have sworn is solid drifts at our feet.

Come to personal terms with neocatastrophism

as conditions on earth change only very slowly,

except when they don’t, watch as

Rationalization convolutes as

contradictions accumulate, watch in

stunned silence until a finally perspicacious

prophet for our desperate age calls a red spade

a red spade and reminds the spellbound

that graptolites turn out not to be hieroglyphs,

even as we look for ziczac in

environments where it brooks no human,

nor even biological, origin. You are your own

Nemesis, Veronica told me as though it

were a consolation prize. As I am mine

and all of our kind are all of ours. We have

done it to ourselves and if you want me

to hear about it so we together may indulge

a worldly fantasy of having told the truth

in a truthless world, so be it. You remind me of Ruth

among the alien corn, was all I could think to reply.

We are neither of us going anywhere, not even

in pursuit of espèces perdues. I think the game

is over and not because it’s been delayed by rain. He who

has no name said a fire not a flood next time,

she agreed. So there we sat in a dead draw

in Terra Incognita and waited silently,

watching a senseless sun fire the bluff

to the east from its impersonal house in the west.

Bottom of the Sixth Discography

Paul Simon, Graceland, Warner Brothers, 1986

Bob Dylan, Good As I Been To You, Columbia, 1992        

John Eddie, Who the Hell is John Eddie? Lost Highway, 2003

The Chad Mitchell Trio, Reflecting, 1964

Southern Culture on the Skids, Santo Swings, Estrus Records, 1996

Well-known Degenerate Laramie Musicians, “Roamin’ through Wyoming,” Responsibility No One Dare Take, @ 1977

James McMurtry, Live in Aught-Three, Compadre Records, 2004

New Riders of the Purple Sage, New Riders, MCA, 1976

The Brian Setzer Orchestra, The Brian Setzer Orchestra,  

     Hollywood, 1994

The Hollywood Argyles, “Alley Oop,” Marginal, 1960

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, 4 Way Street, Atlantic, 1971

Kasey Chambers, The Captain, EMI, 1999

Peter Paul & Mary, Moving, Warner Brothers, 1963

Desmond Dekker and the Aces, “Israelites,” Uni Records, 1968

The Rolling Stones, Beggar’s Banquet, Decca, 1968

Leonard Cohen, Live in London, Sony, 2009

Grateful Dead, Terrapin Station, Arista, 1977

Bottom of the Sixth

Maybe that higher power has got its own

self a little too high.  (Many fey wise jokes on

4/20 and Easter being the same day

in the local news.)  And how wise may we be,

O wise ones?  We procurers of all good

bad and arguably ugly on a fine

Saturday baseball afternoon with wrap

around games and plenty to smoke if that

way your pleasure tends.  Or trends?  The trends

are not so good.  It is the bottom of the sixth

somewhere in baseball land.  And also in

this our Turtle Island home where too many

run far amok amid distressing dreams of

dead brothers, grandparents, and big old tortoises.

The bottom of the 6^th, continues

           

The lady scientist believes in God so it all might

seem to be at least a little bit justified.  Did the

Lady Eve believe in He Who Has No Name?

Even when He didn’t, at least not quite yet then?

Then it was that that sweet toothed serpent

wormed his way in.  He was a He, right?  Isn’t

it all the fault of some gender specific male

who got a little indeterminate at some point.

Bless his pointed little head by all means.

And then point your own little head where it doesn’t

want to go and get used to the idea that it is

the bottom of the sixth and that even your own weird

little genes will not likely survive the seventh extinction

no matter how important they seem to you, at the moment.

Routinely Oblivious

There are those, I have heard reported,

who report immediately as though they are

there.  Which they are, as far as I can tell.

I am not one such.  I, routinely oblivious, still remember

Nonesuch, the label where we of limited income

could buy for two or three dollars putatively obscure

classical music.  Albinoni, for example, sublime

keyboard compositions from the Italian Baroque.

Also a very fine St. Matthew Passion which

Gary Rillema reported from Married Student Housing

in Laramie, (2016 Land), to his parents that he was

listening to Handel’s Messiah on a Sunday nowhere

near either Christmas nor Easter.  Nonesuch, as such, also

for some folk musicians, as was that Vanguard.

Setting Picks

He thinks he’s King Crimson when he can profess

to hate a baseball team.  It’s easily done,

you just pick anyone, pick to provoke a Sabbath

of discord.  Better than religion, one supposes,

although supposing can get troublesome somewhere

down the line.  Bottom of the sixth.  Nobody on,

and setting picks is a foul in certain contact sports.

Pick your poisons, you honorable combatants in

competitions with uncertain rules.  The rule

of the variously pissed off pisses on all kinds

sticking around.  Kind of the point.  So more than kith,

so less than kind, and there we go again.  Kind? 

Kind of

 like an entry

                     in the ungulate division. 

The Bolt House

And then there we were at the Bolt house with

those magnificent twin black walnut trees within a

horseshoe drive where Uncle Harry aka

Jim argued with his father about God’s elect

when he wasn’t selling shoes at that store

with the Xray-your-foot machine

on Eastern Ave., Catty Corner from

Eastern Avenue Xtian Reformed Church.

Right down the street from Burton Street and

a house of another sort where Burt Vander Meer

aspired to a ministry and which his kid and me tried

to burn down, accidentally of course, playing

with matches in the cellar as we might have in any

old house, and failed, although not without trying.

The Higher Power

Spring Peepers, remember them?  Froggy

went a’courtin’, at least in Ravenscroft's 

Melismata version.  Sadly, had no greenback

dollars.  But he sang what must be sung. 

And it all turned out pretty good!  Molly Mouse

was the hat check girl.  Money don’t get

everything, it’s true.  Kills a froggy or two,

though.  And then there’s a person from

Greenpeace all dressed up for Porlock.

Might even talk to her if she didn’t

look like a toad and want greenback dollars.

Darwin spent the Beagle Voyage pretty much

seasick, and still got down words that struck

Newman as “direct revelation of a higher power.”

The pointillism of the Masters

Who would have thought there to be such pink

in so bloodily red white & blue a gallery?

If only we could hit it close, that close, close

enough to seem to have an idea, any idea at all

of what we did or even why it was done.

No such luck. Our kind are not kind nor

in right mind to do something that tough,

again. And what was it and why so tough, again?

A night from now our sun will eclipse our moon

billowing diaphanous plumes against our planet-

bound doomed intentions, hopes, even,

of a safer universe, a place we might see from

a home of our own, from a place we think we live,

where we give surly lip service to our Masters.

ACD

It’s enough to make you want to go to Africa,

just like that girl in Johnny’s Camaro.

“How you get up there?” Well, she had jumped.

The bump in the up, nine degrees by the end

2099, so to speak, at least the degrees are in F,

only five in C!  “The frog does not drink

up the pond in which he lives.” At least that’s

what the Sioux said but we all know what became

of them. Maybe the Frogs did it?  Maybe not, eh? 

The worst-case 2100 scenario is only 6C so

don’t we have a degree with which we may

happily play?  Even NASA agrees and even

Texas Christians fund those guys. ACD? 

Look it up for your very own self.

Verdi cries

I draw a jackal-headed woman in the sand

and protect her with my wits from the libel

that she is just another welfare queen.

So was Cleopatra.  Her welfare wasn’t protected?

Time to start rising for the moon! Anubis?

You dare to bring Anubis up? You’d be in

transgenderland! You’d be rising for the moon, and you

might even get there. For the moment, lets

adore Hypatia, sadly done in by good Christians

of the Alexandrine profession.  Fathers, don’t let

your daughters grow up to be scientists!

The dog-faced troops can support themselves.

They’re awful good at making killers.

Not near so good at making men.

Remembering Nam

Happily, we remember the salad days

of American Empire. Strafe the town.

Who are we, or anyone, to judge?

Kill the people.  And embrace as family

the brave fellaheen given helicopters

to dispense napalm. It’s not for me to judge. 

Those were the good old days when you

could get stoned on valium and gin while all

the fine young fellas from someone’s

hometown dropped napalm on someone else’s.

I remember Nam too.  It seemed for a time

a time to forget, but I couldn’t quite. Never quite

forgot how they got out there every Sunday to catch

them perfidious Gooks at their morning prayer.

Movie Review

And so we come to that old sepia of old

New York where the sentient cowboy up

and lead a mirthful parade, but no one quite

dare call it Great. Not like Citizen Kane

or Birth of a Nation or A Clockwork Orange.

Not even Robert Osborne.  It’s pretty good though. 

There are pigs and llamas and ponies leaping

impossibly from a railroad  boxcar.

Bolivia didn’t really look like that.

Or did it?  Does it still?  We’ll all feel a lot better

after we rob a couple of banks.  Won’t we?

Promise?  Adios! Sweet Betsy from Pike

was never any sweeter.  Bingo!

Están Swingles?  Non! que es la familia de la perdiz!