Boy and Earth: An Environmental Love Story

                                                                 
Children, a musician once said, are born wordlessly imploring their mothers to sing to them. The human body is, at its core, an instrument of song. And so, of course, are celestial bodies, though we hear them only in our sleep.

Melting blue marbled earth breathing wordless music in vast throaty syllables of lung-tissue softness. (Somewhere east of Samoa, the heaving bosom of the ocean swims under her see-through negligee of clouds like the detachable blue lung in the transparent chest of the scale-model manikin you built as a child.) Touched by felt hammers of darkness, her velvety vocal cords are stretched to the circumference, parallel lines of force that begin from nowhere and intersect there, on infinite arcs, somewhere beyond the electromagnetic spectrum. Deerskin pelt: Arabia seen from space. Tawny suede. Softer than under a blouse, or a skirt, which she shimmies to her ankles with an electric rustle after unbuckling her Van Allen radiation belt. Wriggles out of her Doppler shift. Humid, dewy gem. Naked to the heavens, caressed by the hand of the void. Waiting for a solar wind to lick her moisture off. Poised to strike astronauts mad with her beauty, as they hover weightless, peeping like boys through a Pyrex porthole on the international space station. In sleep we wear the earth like earmuffs, tête à l’étau, as if she sang with her thighs. Leg-locked in the music of the infinite. (We all know the music women make when they’re pleased.)

                                   The blouse of clouds that hide your beauty’s form
                                   Obliterated by a summer storm
                                   You stand nude to the horizon: this is what
                                   Set all things stirring once in a boy’s gut.


We all have skin in this game. “Human” derives from “humus,” earth. Our nostrils are never totally disencumbered from the soil of our birth. We imbibe her essence, the mother’s essence, through our nostrils every time we breathe, like craft cocktails. Sex On the Beach. The Slippery Nipple. Eye of the Komodo. (Jörmungandr, the old Norse World Serpent. Our olfactory bulbs are close to our reptilian centers, two regions connected like the East Side and Williamsburg by the Canarsie tube of the mind.) La Puesta Del Sol, vermouth and red grapefruit juice. Her drowsy fumes make the sun sleepy. To breathe mortal air is to be always more or less tipsy on her sunset perfume. We would constantly lose our heads if it weren’t for the stars to guide us. The stars are our principles, our conscience, our mathematics and our Last Judgement. Constellations are our tea leaves, parliamentary rules of order and city council by-laws. The sober man wakes before Phosphorus, to feel his flesh shrink and skin harden and sting under a cold shower of stars. But with her arts of seduction the earth eventually invites every man under her warm, mouldering blanket of human compost, giardino delle delizie terrene, which at this very moment sticks to the soles our shoes.


Rocks tower in the distance, seem to float in the blazing blue sea like volcanic dumplings. Black Sea. Black dumplings. Sweet as honey, a child kneels on a pine bench, hair in a pirate’s kerchief, elbows propped in front of her on a mahogany yacht railing, her little bikini-diapered derrière protruding backward like a sticky bun wrapped in pastry parchment. Russian plutocrat’s daughter. Made his money from God knows what environmental obscenity. Vast salt basin where the Aral Sea once stood. But his daughter is sweet, with her sunburned nose. She is the earth. Every outrage to the virginity of the sea, the forest and the mountains seems to render her more intact. “I will bury you,” she seems to say to her industrialist father as she smiles, like Khrushchev, with apple-cheeked serenity at peaks in the distant Caucasus, whose snows streak the air like clouds.

Chilean Fruit: A Parable of Globalism

                                                                     I

March 15, 2013.

Bodies in freefall. Levitation. Resurrection.

I know what everyone is thinking. Not another essay on suicide.

You dine on fresh fruit flown at extravagant cost from Chile. But you know you have become enslaved to a new global economy of produce, and so your fruit smacks of slave food. You want to buy it from the Amish farmer down the road, but there is no such farmer, and the road is a freeway, and heavy chains rattle and gall your flesh. What to do?

A woman from New Jersey stopped her black Dodge Durango in traffic on the upper deck of the George Washington Bridge, vaulted two guardrails and leapt—complete with handbag—200 feet into a surprised swarm of soft gray chill March water molecules, aguas de marco, “waters of March,” babbling in divine Português to the accompaniment of some non-existent Jobim soundtrack.

Needless to say, the water molecules presented a united front against the assault of this alien body hurtling 122 mph in freefall (terminal velocity—look it up on Wikipedia). A solid body, moving at great speed, tends to liquify in contact with stationary water. Splash.

Moral: Walk softly over the earth. Carry a parachute. (Sometimes awkward in the subway.)

The steel architecture of the George Washington Bridge continued to laugh and soar. (“Here steel architecture finally seems to laugh” said Le Corbusier in 1937 of “the world’s most beautiful bridge”—again, Wikipedia.)

In truth, the great GWB can stretch your heart on a rack. It makes the sky seem monstrous blue.

One feels impaled on harp strings, like the unfortunate in that curious painting by Bosch. One’s body ascends face-first to heaven on an elevator of twisted steel cables, which sing in the wind. There is music in the bridge.

Swan dive off the George Washington Bridge. I arrived at 2:05 or 2:10 pm, on my triathlon-rigged carbon Pinarello, bound for a training run in the untrammeled freedom of the New Jersey Palisades. The Palisades: curtains of towering purple granite that fence the mighty waters of the Hudson for twenty miles upriver. The sky was like a huge blue lung that seemed to breathe, collectively, for the entire human race, even for my mother, recently dead of lung cancer and emphysema. Hence the bromide  “breath-taking.” Spectacle to revive the dead. Two police officers, already on the scene, shielded their eyes against the inhuman, superhuman glare of the merciless, mineral-blue waters, which spread out like a palace floor—a sea of agate trod by Thetis’ feet—beneath the bridge. Thetis, Greek sea goddess. Clutching the guardrail of the bike-path with one hand, the near officer swiftly released his visored hand from his brow and extended it down-river in a pointing motion like a military salute, mouthing the faint word “There.” “There” expanded deafeningly in the awful vacuum of azure space. A police radio chattered. A police boat raced upriver. A helicopter hovered frantically. Two attractive joggers eyed the policemen shyly. A sharp March wind kissed my face eagerly. It was like passing a funeral cortege, only “closer to life” as art connoisseurs say. Death as exhibition. Blue ruin.

But what lovely behavior of silk-sack clouds! Skittish, colt-like, curvetting effortlessly over heaven’s blue ballroom floor. You would have melted in blue admiration for those mild, melting, nursery-school behaviors.

I wrote a poem to the Hudson’s merciless beauty, dated Valentine’s Day, 2013 (one month before you jumped). I now dedicate it to you.

                                                      Hudson River,
                                                 George Washington Bridge

Unraveled from your rain spool, O mist-spun
River, a smeared jewel  in the noonday sun
Crowned with a feast of aether! Stray clouds pass
Locked enthralled in your high tower of glass

Like parsley flowers strewn on a hillside’s crest,
Spars or ribs in Jupiter’s mighty chest,
Florentine tresses plaited with wildflowers,
Worlds on a dial of planetary hours

Enameled with celestial animals—
Flora and fauna that a light wind mauls.
Crushed like unwrinkled water I fall too
Prostrate under this avalanche of blue.

Thus the hours of day dream on the water,
Night-scales and day-scales of the ocean’s daughter,
And as time creeps toward his lightless deep
Under her steel-gray dragon mantle sleep.

                                   ( February 15, 2013)

Sleep well in the coils of the dragon, purse lady. The ghost of your Dodge Durango, dressed as if for a funeral, keeps watch for its mistress beside the guardrail, its passenger-side door still open in stunned disbelief (and no small measure of hurt feelings). I pass it three times a week on my way to the Palisades.

                                                            II

Strong and weak forces. Gravitation (die Schwere).

“Sons of the Earth” (Söhne der Erde) like the Rhein and the Hudson—said Friedrick Hölderlin in his hymn “Der Rhein” (1808)—are “alliebend” (all-loving) “wie die Mutter” (like the mother). “So empfangen sie auch mühlos, die Glücklichen, Alles.” So they bear their burden of happiness without effort. Mortal man, by contrast—der sterbliche Mann—“when he bethinks himself on his burden of happiness, and the sky he has heaved on his shoulders with loving arms”—

                                Wenn er den Himmel, den
                                Er mit den liebenden Armen
                                sich auf die Schultern gehäuft,
                                Und die Last der Freude bedenket—

is “terrified” and “dismayed” (“erschröckt” and “überrascht”).

                               Denn schwer ist zu tragen
                               Das Unglück, aber schwerer das Glück.

For happiness is a heavier burden to bear, says Hölderlin, than unhappiness.

The Thirteen Colonies

July 4th. Noisy, incandescent bouquets of explosive lithium salts (hollyhock red) and barium compounds (chrysanthemum green) bruise the sky, already bruised with toxic greenhouse gas emissions. Bombs bursting in air like liberty’s aneurysm. Paroxysms of public anxiety masquerading as celebration. The great national stupor. Eyeballs hammered with explosive percussions so loud you can’t see. Windows to the soul. Stiff breeze rattles the shutters closed. Take five. Rationality’s snooze. Good for the national psyche. Cudgeled brains soak up more patriotic music. Mallet for tenderizing the meat. Like Ariel, I drink the air before me and depart. Goodbye, anxiety, says America. Don’t bother to write. We never liked your cucumber vinaigrette. And the twee silk socks you wore under your tailored suits.

My name is anxiety. I fled your feast to lighten your festivities. Small thanks I get, or expect. I am designing a new Independence Day. My musket is propped beside the drafting table. But first I must assemble my thirteen colonies for review. Parade ground, march!  À nous la liberté!

From the moment explorers and navigators discovered a new world—me—I have been intent on colonizing this virgin continent (though I blush to say “virgin.”) The explorers and navigators published their findings in the poetic tomes and novels of my youth. But I have always been a careless reader. And the progress of colonization has been, I confess, painfully slow. But I intend to let it proceed under the strictest ecological principles. I approach the whole problem of colonization like a naturalist, not a planter. I embark on a study of the wilderness behind the curvature of my own cheekbone, where splashing rivulets of blood course through rugged channels of bone and cortex. Special emphasis will be directed to avian specimens of imagination and memory, lurking in the vegetation of time. All of it will be written up in a special calf-bound box set, available only by subscription. Reserve yours now.

There is a pool called the Eye of Time. A stone pitched into its center slides with a gulp down a long gullet of water and disappears into another world. Around it are ranged the thirteen cavities—I mean colonies. Here yeast cultures flourish in humid clefts of rock. One yields the wine of courage (really more like a seasonal artisanal beer). Another breeds the strong milk of retrospection. One sweats a fermented concoction of enlightened desperation and hope. Beads of icy sangfroid collect on a cold stone curtain of granite obscured by ferns. One cleft echoes with the laughter of knowledge.

Here fortitude, a master free-climber, wedges two chalky fingertips in a minute crack, on a sheer rock face thousands of meters below the spongy forest floor. In one dripping crevice a lone salamander bathes in royal perfume. In this chink, a visitor sniffs inevitability. In that one, top notes of demure sadness steeped in revery, disenchantment and remorse.

Pain luxuriates in another recess, with its children. This one reeks with the good old barley malt. A third gives off poisons of ratiocination. Finally, this one stinks like a female orifice.

These are the thirteen colonies in which I nurture cultures of freedom. Out of them flows the serpent of freedom. Divided by seven cervical and five thoracic vertebrae (the ones directly between the shoulder blades) like the tail of a rattlesnake, it coils like incense through the hole at the base of my skull to blossom like a fruit tree. Unite, or Die. Don’t Tread On Me. Burnished apples blaze like eyes in the dark.