June 2015
I was born in Denver, Colorado, on the westernmost edge of the Great Plains, and I’ve always responded to and aspired to a quality in poetry that I can only call “clarity.” Not that I’m interested in clarity at the expense of honest complexity; after all, light is not always benign: it blinds as often as it reveals, as anyone who’s grown up in my part of the world would know. That duality fascinates me and continues to shape my work. I’ve published 15 collections of poems over the years, most recently Marked Men, Thread of the Real, and The Earth-Boat, and in September 2014 Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper appointed me to a four-year term as Colorado Poet Laureate. I teach for the University of Denver’s University College, where I also direct two graduate degree programs, and live with my wife Melody in the foothills southwest of Denver.
T h e G u l f
The Gulf oil spill is recognized as the worst oil spill in U.S. history. Within days of the April 20, 2010 explosion and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico that killed 11 people, underwater cameras revealed the BP pipe was leaking oil and gas on the ocean floor about 42 miles off the coast of Louisiana. By the time the well was capped on July 15, 2010 (87 days later), an estimated 3.19 million barrels of oil had leaked into the Gulf. -Smithsonian Institution
The marine biologist sinks
a blue-gloved hand into the Gulf,
then draws it out, stunned silent
by blackness dripping from his fingers.
‗‗‗‗‗‗‗
The columnist and tele-intellectual,
known back in college as Little Georgie,
owl-eyes the moderator and shakes
off the catastrophe. “Accidents happen.”
Capitalism’s dangerous, he means.
Big rewards demand big risks.
Market wisdom. No pain, no gain.
‗‗‗‗‗‗‗
The heron sails low over the grassy marsh,
its legs sleeved up to the knee-joints in crude,
nowhere to land that isn't poison, nowhere
to stand and snap up a clean fish or two.
*
At the edge of the marsh, a half dozen
former fishermen crouch to wipe oil
off the long leaves of grass, in silence;
their Company contracts ban them
from talking to the media. Their pain
has nowhere to land, but keeps on
circling above the beloved waters,
spiraling lower as the weeks go by.
*
Tony Hayward, CEO of BP (two letters
advertised to mean Beyond Petroleum),
speaks freely to CNN. “No one,” he says,
“wants this thing over more than I do.
I'd like my life back.”
Later, he climbs
into a limo that whispers him away
to a throbbing helicopter, thence
to an airstrip where the Company jet
stands ready to loft him back to London,
30,000 feet over the lightless Atlantic.
In his mind he's already holding a tumbler
of Ladybank single malt on the rocks.
How many eleven-thousand-dollar-a-day
paychecks can he “earn” before the Board
cuts him loose?
Hell—the sooner the better!
How sweet to sway under a golden parachute,
age 54, the rest of a life in front of him….
‗‗‗‗‗‗‗
Robots on the sandy bottom
saw at the pipe to ready it
for a capping attempt,
but the boil of oil and methane
keeps on thundering up
in diarrheal billows.
A sickening sight, yes—
but far from where we live.
How sad for those living there!
Our thoughts and prayers—etcetera…
‗‗‗‗‗‗‗
Decaying fish at the fouled tideline--
more fish than Jesus conjured up
at Bethsaida. A mockery of miracles!
The Gulf's abundance wiped out
so people like me can drive twenty miles
each way to work, gulp bottled water,
keep leftovers cold for days before
finally tossing them out.
The primordial dead power the pictures
that move me to write, the underwater
cameras that make me an impotent witness.
Even the ink in my pen is implicated,
my better angels beached in slick goop
like pelicans, heads cranked back,
eyes frosted over in the wind.
Even the ink in my pen....
‗‗‗‗‗‗‗
Day 46.
TV ads tout BP's commitment to clean-up.
News of a stalled rebound: unemployment, 9.7 percent.
Commercials for the new Infiniti: air-conditioned to mimic bucolic breezes; the dashboard’s wood hand-rubbed with silver dust.
The “spill” (a PR term meaning “eruption”) stains everything.
Three thousand square miles of the Gulf's surface sheened or slathered, the Gulf winds infused with stench.
A hundred meters down: the plumes like sprawling Rorschachs, petro-globs tumbling like fallen angels toward the Dry Tortugas, toward the lightless Atlantic.
Ocean floor: the very ground of Being a kind of Pompeii, sooted over by rotting animacules, most so holy they've never acquired a name.
‗‗‗‗‗‗‗
Day 47.
You expected,
maybe,
an epiphany….
‗‗‗‗‗‗‗
The Empire once made Greece its suburb.
Then the Empire made the Wild West its suburb.
Now the Empire's made the whole globe its suburb.
Poetry: enslaved to Rhetoric,
or worse, Linguistics.
Whatever you expected
clearly will not come to pass.
Only the Gulf dying as we speak.
Only blackness dripping from our pens.
‗‗‗‗‗‗‗
And yet—hypocrite poet!—here you sit,
casting your bitter lines out into the Gulf.
‗‗‗‗‗‗‗
Between the I who sneers and the I who grieves,
between the one who writes and the ones who read,
between the solitary heart and nullity: the Gulf.
Against our own greed we side with the Gulf.
Against our pride, our numbed spirits, against
the gag shame has stuffed in our mouths—
we speak out. To restore the Gulf we speak out,
speak to restore, if we can, our own trashed nature.
In a tense not past, present, or future—we speak.
(We speak, said the poet, in the possible tense.)
Though our voices may vacillate, we speak
for the “flow of unforeseeable novelty” that is
the Gulf. Using words estranged by politicos,
corporatists, postmodernists, we speak up
for both the Gulf within and the Gulf without—
speaking, anyway, to make the possible possible.
Author's Note: Writing in the "possible" tense is a concept put forward by Breyten Breytenbach in Intimate Stranger. The “flow of unforeseeable novelty” is from Henri Bergson’s description of Time in The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics
Credit: I'm grateful to the editors of the eco-poetry website Poets for Living Waters, where an earlier version of "The Gulf" was published in June 2010.
Credit: I'm grateful to the editors of the eco-poetry website Poets for Living Waters, where an earlier version of "The Gulf" was published in June 2010.
©2015 Joseph Hutchison