The Problem of the Many, page 10
metal toothpicks on rooftops: evidence of the absent. An elephant
caravan crosses Brooklyn Bridge as British and Hessian
troops kill Maryland soldiers (256) in front of my daughter’s
school of brick and mortar. Up North, on a splashed white horse
and a bay, Wamsutta and Metacomet, sons of Wampanoag
sachem Massasoit, dead but a week, stop at a cranberry bog
on their way to Plymouth to adopt new names: Alexander
and Philip, hoping to feel a little of their father’s friendlier
connection to the colonists. But with a decade of more life lost
to unchecked expansion, overhunting, shame, and a holocaust
of European diseases, King Philip will push back against the
arrogance after one last taste of it in late June with a lengthy
full-scale war that ends with his quartered body hanging like
garland in a tree, his head from a swamp in Bristol on a pike
carried up to Plymouth for political purposes, not too unlike those
motivating Ptolemy to hijack the long lavish funeral pro-
cession of Alexander the Great, digressing his body from a path
to Macedonia and into Egypt instead. He knew death
would make more of Alexander than life itself had, and whatever
city his tomb sat in would be a jewel to humanity forever.
That’s what he wanted for Alexandria. City whose namesake
founder dreamed a vision of an isle in front of Egypt that broke
the progress of the stormy sea. He had read about it in Homer,
and here it was at last: Pharos, steadfast in the harbor
nature made and engineering divided in half with a bridge.
City of seabirds eating barley meant for cakes and porridge
but used to outline unbuilt buildings when they ran out of chalk.
City whose lighthouse served ends practical and symbolic
at once: bright limestone, 400 feet high, it made the flat port visible
to vessels at sea, even by day, and guided nearer vessels
through hazardous shoal waters. And more, it would stand for
the city’s wealth, and its chutzpah, offering views of the splendor
of the ocean and the polis alike. It cast complex Alexander
in a fine posthumous light, and likewise acted as reminder
of Zeus’s goodwill toward travelers by sea (a statue of him kept
watch from the roof). It brought the world to Egypt, Egypt
into the future. Ptolemy started the project and Ptolemy
II saw it to completion, which demonstrated the integrity
of the Ptolemaic dynasty, up to and including Cleopatra almost
three centuries later. And by extension, it came to suggest
what we make connects the living to the dead, or it can if we take
pains to secure it against tides, Romans, and one earthquake
after another. Conversely, it connects the dead to the living
in a way they feel less threatened by, and then even the living
to life itself, which is a study of connections, as architecture is,
such that if I fear myself, what I am fearing is all of us, but for us.
Roof
We hope for better things. A magnitude, a quantity
that can’t be packed with ease like five into a quincunx
pattern on the die, or likewise echoed through the tree trunks’
placement in an orchard. Here the branches of an apple
fan like fingers from a hand, its forearm twisting up
through dirt to demonstrate revival, even to the doubter
who pokes at holy wounds to test their authenticity.
We want what we don’t know, or what we know of mostly
through a long furnaceous rumbling lack of it composes
piecewise into numbers the choir of our never having
had it sings, not so much to give release as to give shape to
what we welcome back in finer form, in robes the color
of the Nile flowing north inside a child’s encyclopedia.
When I felt the climbing up at first I meant to swallow it.
Tried to pen it in my lungs. Couldn’t think of anyone
ever making sentences equal to the miracle I felt I was
containing. No rinse of recollection of any having heard.
Sank reasonable the urge to tamp that river in me down
on account of its immeasure. But we spare no length
for pleasure, know no room for reason when the crowd of us
amasses. These are our circumstances. To not know how
to demonstrate it doesn’t mean doesn’t exist, a cracked-
open pyramid amid the basic grasses of a life. We could be
contented with the cow of it, somehow, but we can’t.
We hope for things better. An amplitude, some pressure
counter to the dominant. We build a roof above our head
to limn the need to raise it, an orange compliment paid
to the waves above Detroit, its blue light scattered bluer
by particles no citizen can put a pin in, by an ember against
a gray we stand under, knowing what rises from the ashes.
Burning Lichen from a Bronze Age Megalith
Never before in the wind indigenous
to the Atlantic have I felt
commonsensical to myself, and now
is no time
to start: loud power, constant
boom, I have wanted to live
like this in the longform, the way
a plant can
on air, suspended in
its element, swallowed whole
by the senses: cold clear sky,
companionable sun, no need
not answered, all alien
to advanced thought, which has only
ever brought more suffering.
Not technically a plant, not even one
thing, but the mutually
beneficial union of a fungus and green
and/or blue-green
algae, you’ve been with me
in the longform, long enough
for me to forget I didn’t
fold you up in the clear
of a Ziploc, which is how it
looked, but in a hotel shower cap
that, if I hadn’t,
would have one day clung to the head
of a fellow traveler I’ll never
know, keeping hair dry, which is why
it was put there, and I’m sorry.
Elsewhere, another traveler caught
my attention once, saying
you dropped something back there
on the sidewalk
and automatically I thanked her
without asking what
it looked like I had dropped
so I spent the next
ten minutes looking for what
I didn’t know, which is a rare
and almost holy state of mind
I couldn’t wait to be
released from—then there
you were, my little two-inch square
of lichen fallen out of the open
pouch of my backpack. Now, brow
riddled with the storms of
administration, I lay the green-gray
threads of you
on a block of dried-out peat
like a sugar cube and light it
in order to inhale
whatever principle of the sea
your filaments might
retain, or of the sea-blown
air you grew in, or of the rock
you anchored to before
I tore you off it, its purpose
uncertain, your smoke bitter, but enough
of an obstruction to see through.
Insomnia
As darkness dissolves
the forms of things
they appear to merge
into the one
unbroken substance
they have been
all along, no single
component of which
can be said to exist
by necessity, but with
such continuous
relation to all other
components, it’s as if
nothing can be
lost without change
to everything, nothing
can be lost without
losing everything.
Hymn to Life
There were no American lions. No pygmy mammoths left
or giant short-faced bears, which towered over ten feet high
when rearing up on their haunches. There were no stout-
legged llamas, stilt-legged llamas, no single Yukon horse. The last
of the teratorns, its wingspan broader than the room in
which I’m writing now, had long since landed on a tar pit’s
surface and was lost. There might be other things to think of
strobing in the fume or sometimes poking through the thick of it
like the tiny golden toads once so prevalent in the cloud
forests north of Monteverde, only none of them are living
anywhere anymore. The last was seen on May 15, 1989, the week
Bon Jovi’s “I’ll Be There for You” topped Billboard’s Hot 100.
Then it dropped to three. A teratorn might have fit in here
the long way come to think of it. Studies claim it wasn’t
climate change that killed the golden toad but a fungal epidemic
provoked by cyclical weather patterns. Little things like that
had a way of disappearing: thimbles, the Rocky Mountain
grasshopper, half the hearing in my patient ear. There were
no eastern elk, no sea mink, and no heath hens, a distinct
subspecies of the prairie chicken. Once common to the coastland
barrens of New Hampshire down to Virginia, they’re often thought
to have been eaten in favor of wild turkey at the inaugural
Thanksgiving feast. To work on my character I pretend to be
traveling Portsmouth to Arlington in modern garb at first,
then backwards into costumes of the past: T-shirt and shorts,
gray flannel suit, a cutaway jacket and matching breeches
tucked into boots, taupe velvet getup with ruffles and ribbons
streaming into Delaware till I’m buckled like a Puritan, musket
in hand, not half-famished, and there’s plenty of heath hens
everywhere I look. But there were still no Carolina parakeets
and no Smith Island cottontails, a long-contested subspecies
of the eastern cottontail. These lost rabbits, somewhat shaggier
than their mainland cousins, were named for the barrier
island off the tip of Virginia’s Eastern Shore, where Thomas Dale,
deputy governor of the Virginia Colony, set up a saltworks
back in 1614, and not for the Chesapeake’s other Smith Island
up in Maryland, birthplace of the Smith Island cake, that state’s
only official dessert—a venerable confection whose pencil-
thin layers, numbering eight to twelve on average, lie divided
by a fudge-like frosting cooked for greater lastingness, making it
suitable for local oystermen to take with them on the long
autumn harvest. Smith Island in Washington offers nesting
sites for tufted puffins on its rocky cliff faces as well as rest
stations for migrant sea lions. Situated in Long Island Sound,
Connecticut’s Smith Island is among that state’s famed Thimble
Islands, a cluster of landmasses named for the thimbleberry,
cousin to the black raspberry. During the Revolutionary War,
the Thimbles were deforested to rid the sound of hiding
places for British ships. Alabama boasts no fewer than three
Smith Islands. Little can be said about the one in Minnesota’s
Voyageurs National Park. Its neighboring islands include
Rabbit, Snake, Wolf, Wigwam, Sweetnose, and Twin Alligator
down here on the American side, and Little Dry, Big, and Big Dry
up on the Canadian. Tomorrow should be 82° and sunny
but it won’t be. The blue pike cavorted through the waters
of the Great Lakes no longer. Ditto the somber blackfin cisco.
Overfishing, pollution, and the introduction of nonnative
species did both fish in as early as 1960 and ’70, respectively.
There were no spectacled cormorants, no Goff’s pocket gophers,
and no Ainsworth’s salamanders, a species known to us only
through two specimens found on Ainsworth family property
in Mississippi on June 12, 1964. That same day Nelson Mandela
was sentenced to life in prison. I remember the feeling of
another kind, the way they alternately lay limp in my hands
then pleaded to be free. They took naps in the dampness
of softened logs. There’s a fine dirt, a dust I guess, that collects
under the rug I’m sitting on. I think the rough weave of it
acts as rasp to our foot-bottoms then sieve to what it loosens.
There were no Caribbean monk seals, eight of which no less
than Christopher Columbus killed for food in 1494, and therefore
no Caribbean monk seal nasal mites, an objectively hideous
arachnoid parasite that resided nowhere but in the respiratory
passages of the Monachus tropicalis. When it occurs to me I
sweep it up. Back in the day they used to darken our skies
in flocks a mile wide and 300 miles in length, enough to feather
the air from Fall River down to Philadelphia, their peak
population hovering above five billion, or 40% of the total
roll of birds in North America, but there were no remaining
passenger pigeons, the last of their red eyes having shut
in Cincinnati on September 1, 1914. Her name was Martha.
Martha Washington went by Patsy as a child. Her pet raccoon
was Nosey. Cozumel Island’s pygmy raccoon is actually a distinct
species and not, like the Barbados raccoon, a subspecies
of the common. There might be as few as 250 of the former
hidden in the mangroves or prowling the wetlands for ghost
crabs and lizards, whereas the latter was last seen in ’64
when one was struck dead by a car in Bathsheba, a fishing village
built on Barbados’s eastern shore, magnet for hurricanes
and pro surfers, its foamy white waters calling to mind
the milk baths rumored to have kept Solomon’s mother so
perilously beautiful. First the milk’s lactic acid would have
acted as an exfoliant, gently removing layers of the dead,
dry skin to uncover younger, fresher skin waiting like artwork
in Dunkirk underneath, then the milk’s natural fat content
would restore moisture lost to the exacting atmosphere
of biblical Jerusalem, whose name in Hebrew, yireh shalem,
means “will see peace.” Most versions of the story make her
into an exhibitionist but the Midrash says Bathsheba, modest,
was washing behind a wicker screen when Satan, seizing
opportunity, appeared as a red bird to David who, cocksure
with projectiles now, aimed the stone in his hands at the bird
but hit the screen instead, splitting it in half and thereby
revealing our bather, the wife of Uriah the Hittite at the time
but not for much longer. All these gains and losses, so mysterious
from a distance, held together it has felt by nothing stronger
than momentum, like a series of bicycle accidents or a pattern
in the pomegranate, come to hint at a logic in time, but whether
it’s more fitting to say that they promise to reveal it or else
threaten to is debatable. Attempts to stem the vast mosquito
population in salt marshes abutting Kennedy Space Center
on Florida’s Merritt Island, technically a peninsula but more like
a question mark of land flopped into the Atlantic, devastated
the dusky seaside sparrow. Its last known specimen died
on June 17, 1987, when the ballad “Always” by Atlantic Starr
dominated radio. Mosquitoes would have taken to the nasty
Olduvai waterhole around which two clans of hominids battle
at the start of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. This is after
the first monolith shows up. The film’s monoliths are artifacts
of alien origin, identical in ratio but varying in size, designed
to provoke large-scale changes in human life. As when it dawns
on the wiry leader of the clan the first monolith appears to
to bludgeon the other to death with a leg bone. Later on he hurls it
into the air to celebrate his power, the image of its tumbling
weaponhood at half-speed match-cutting to that of a long
white nuclear satellite angled in orbit against the scintillant
anthracite of space. Pan right to Earth, or a quarter of it silvery
blue in the corner, aloofly beautiful for sure but only a pale
idea of a planet when set beside photographs taken years later
by the crew of Apollo 17 on December 7, 1972, annus finalis
for the Lake Pedder earthworm, bush wren, and possibly
the Toolache wallaby as well, long considered among kangaroos
to have been the most elegant. The sapphire blue, the ochre
of Africa, the chalk-white spirals convolving as if an icecap’s
wispy tentacles. They were killed for fur, sport, and frequently
with the aid of greyhounds, who hunt mostly by way of sight
as opposed to scent. Then Earth is at the left as the satellite
approaches it almost dozily to the opening bars of Strauss’s
“Blue Danube,” first performed on February 15, 1867, in the now-
defunct Diana Ballroom. In my own Diana Ballroom, named
not for the Roman goddess of the hunt, the moon, and chastity
directly, but by way of the two-kilometer lunar crater christened
