'Lengths' was first published in The Use of English 71 (2) Spring 2020. Many thanks to Malcolm Hebron and the English Association. If reading on a phone it is best rotated to landscape.
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Lengths
I had the idea that the world’s so full of pain
it must sometimes make a kind of singing
– Robert Hass
One two three four breathe
Swimming lengths
in my local pool each evening after work
trying to unwind the day’s coil
and write a song for all the species
in my lifetime to have died
An anthem for the Angel Island mouse
A carol for the Christmas Island shrew
An aria for the Aru Flying Fox
the bottom of the pool, tiles like skyscraper windows
A patter song for Po’uli
An old Roman chant
for O’ahu Alauahiu
Breathe
Remember the beach at Marselforn
and the boys thwacking jellyfish out of buckets
onto the pier and prodding them with spades
and puncturing them with the bamboo poles
of their crab nets
fried egg jellyfish that had bloomed
across the sea like a thousand flowers,
beautiful, terrifying, domestic, harmless,
brought on a current against their will
to pulse gently into the whim of boys
whose butchery could not be reasoned with
A round for the Central Rock Rat
A ballad for the Bramble Cay Melomys
Imagine Deep Time
the bottom dropped
out of a well
black sky volcanoes
plates colliding into Paramount
ghosts planing over ice sheets
small clear sea things
growing like floaters on a hot day
hurtling past stars
sun an emergency flare
heartburn violences
speed zoom in camera
boom
For the Wondiwoi tree
kangeroo
a terrific twelve bar blues
Slower, think of my slow
movements
of nothing, then suddenly
something: a sound
a rumble a thunder slick
slop of liquid
a clang a whistle a creak
a bubble go deep
do not believe
that if it doesn’t
make a sound
there’s no one
to hear it
Breathe
Two three four
how else can we imagine the age
of the Earth?
A bass for Bouvier’s Red Colobus
A mass for Maui Akepa, a drinking
song for the Dusky Seaside Sparrow
Flea-wide, detrital, forever,
zircon crystals from Jack Hills,
Western Australia
are the oldest rocks on the whole round planet
their memory locked inside concentric zones
like – ok, imagine – like rings on a tree trunk
four thousand four hundred and four
million years old
I touch the end, forty lengths, a
breath, keep going, a dip
A cover version for the Christmas
Island pipistrelle
push a single zircon crystal
through the Super High Resolution Ion Microprobe
to find the carbon isotope:
it means there may have been surface water,
perhaps even life
A shanty for the Pinta Island tortoise
An earworm for the St. Helena earwig
A kind of singing
humans as pure verb –
mountaintop removal, coral scraping,
damming, deep subsurface injection –
waste rock dumped in Appalachian streams,
Nile Delta starved of sediment, coastal
Louisiana losing an acre of land per hour
as levees suck the soil, pipelines
make the earth subside.
Over and over
our new cartography.
Bald cypress, wax myrtle, cottonwood – an acre –
osprey, ibis, egret, beaver, manatee
For the Scimitar oryx I’ll cut a spiritual,
for the Saudi gazelle a slow jam
and a lullaby for the Liverpool pigeon
and a torch song for Telefomin Cuscus
and a melody for Maui Nukupuu
and a yell for –
Breathe
Today I woke to a glimmer of hope:
legislation for roadside verges,
that they’ll be mown just twice a year
and only after flowers set seed,
so wildlife corridors might guide
invertebrates across the countryside.
A new cartography.
Then: what difference will it make? Then: but still:
legislation, thought, consultation,
work, science. How do we offset the loss
of hope? Red clover. Lady’s bedstraw.
The wild geese that flew over at breakfast,
over the school, into the rain
An answer song for the Alaotra Grebe
which after twenty years the Atitlan Grebe
did answer
Easy to put away all thoughts
but the rhythm of the water-clock
to imagine there’s nothing wrong out there,
that the sky in the big pool windows
shines down like this safely on every crossing
A field holler for the forest ox
A yodel for the Yangtze River dolphin
The lengths we’d go to. Another lap
around the library, all these books and papers
about cloud brightening, veil-making,
genetically engineering trees
to give them more reflective leaves, creating
nuclear winter so soot and smoke
could form a shroud against the best
the sun might throw at us…
the phytoplankton in the Southern Ocean
are feasting on the iron we’ve fed to them
so they in turn will suck our carbon from the air,
the swollen algae blooming into galaxies
A stereophonic madrigal
for the monkey-faced bat
A Geisslerlieder for Emma’s Giant Rat
Breathe
Remember a speech I read –
that sea level rise is already locked in –
means there’s no going back; we are looking
for reprieve;
we are not looking for a sea change;
we’re looking for reprieve;
we are not looking for our children’s children
or our children’s children’s children;
we are looking for reprieve;
we are looking for the space behind
our homes; they teeter on the breeze;
we are not looking to sell up or out; we’re just looking
for reprieve; we’re not looking backwards;
we need something to believe;
we’ll keep going forward, but we’re looking for reprieve
One two three four breathe
kick kick
Tell me again how we’re doing for time
what the wetlands sing as the wetlands drown?
The lengths we could go to: marine
permaculture, regenerative agriculture,
decentralised energy, electric vehicles
a field liberated from its fences,
its seed let go, a neighbour sharing
solar with their neighbour, a network
of driverless cars, slow and on time.
Think of all the space we’d have to breathe.
Why does the language of hope sound less scientific?
When did we forget rocks weren’t nouns but verbs?
Imagine the fields of wild-roaming cattle
Imagine the kelp forests stretching for miles
Imagine the cities we might build
Imagine the songs we might sing
A work song for the West African black rhino
A broadside for Borreo’s Cinnamon Teal
That bright spring morning at Oxford Circus,
Extinction Rebellion’s folkboat,
flotsam and jetsam of tents, flags,
gazebos, pavement chalk. TELL THE TRUTH
three feet high on the bright pink hull,
sail wilting as if just only struggled
into port. Tents unzipping like any campsite,
people bewildered, wanting breakfast. A few police
hovering like bumblebees. Then: the quiet.
No cars. But more than that – all the people
coming from the station, the people
going to work, are quiet. Anything might happen
Breathe
The ricocheting chatter of kids in swimming lessons
and velvet yoke of streetlamps through the big pool windows…
like that golden winter light on the walnut path, a stonechat like a teasel
on a teasel. A year since the wildfire stole three hundred acres
of the Flats, our stomping ground, we stealth through oaks
towards Alexandra Pond, count wheatear, little owl,
the footprints of a just-gone fox.
And on the water gadwall, pochard, a lone goosander.
For weeks we could smell the sweetness of cooked oak
through the kitchen window, hanging in the heatwave-woven air.
Today we watch the birds in a flushed chill breeze,
walk through brambles brimming over in the gorse
A hymn for the Hooded Seedeater
A jingle for Garrido’s hutia
The final length, a breather at the deep end
Remember walking the hill between
the two ancient temples of Mnajdra and Ħaġar Qim,
cicadas clamped to carob trees
clattering their ribs in the heart of the island
clicking their ribs like lussuria or warning
not for us or because of us but as they had done
always, before the milky limestone blocks
were rolled on cut querns and raised to the sky
so the solstice would shine through the limestone eye.
Did the people sing then? Or chant? Or breathe in silence
until the full day swelled to the crack of cicadas?
Amazing how little we know
Swimming lengths in the local pool
One two breathe
one two
I sing what I can for Kauai Oo,
a repeat-after-me for Kauai Nukupuu
