OnEarth Podcast

Memory, Age, and Love Poetry: Talking with Poet Daniel Mark Epstein

Zachary Sussman — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 15:41:17 -0500

Poet and biographer Daniel Mark Epstein recites his poem, "In Late November," and talks with Zachary Sussman about memory, age, and what it means to be a “love poet.”

In Late November
Of the butterfly-bush, whose purple flowers
The monarch and the swallowtail
Sipped in August, near my windowpane
(Such a wealth of wings and flower clusters
I could hardly see the grass, the trees)
Only stalks and branches remain,
And panicles tipped with russet berries.
Now I see everything so vividly:
The young woman on her hands and knees,
Planting the meek shrubs three years ago --
Three short years and thirteen feet below --
Told me the light was perfect here and so
The plants would thrive, just wait and see
How gracefully the flowers would bear wings.
I would see her when she was not there,
Then go blind, standing right beside her.
How could I begin to explain such things?
Soon enough the blossoms reached my sill,
A floor above her terrace flat. Too late
For her to see the wonder she had wrought
Or for me to tell her. She'd moved out.
I never dreamed these branches in full bloom
Would all but block the summer view below:
Garden, gardener and terrace door,
Casting a dappled shadow across my room.
I never knew that when November came
I would miss the butterflies so much
And see the world more clearly than before.

Hard Choices: George Black on Compromise and the Conservation Ethic

Emily Voigt — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 12:59:37 -0500

OnEarth articles editor George Black reads his essay "Time to Be Unfaithful to Old Faithful," and talks with Emily Voigt about controversy and compromise in modern environmentalism.

A Conversation with Poet Chard deNiord

Zachary Sussman — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 09:35:35 -0500

Chard deNiord recites his poems, "Tree of Wisdom" and "Behold, The Lord God Bird," talks with Zachary Sussman about enlightenment, and recounts the strange, sad tale of a bird beyond imagination.

Tree of Wisdom
I am taken in by its stand and breadth,
marveling at its brawn and reach of branches,
studying each leaf like the page of a sacred book,
embracing its trunk like a void.
I hear the prophecy of a lark in the density
of foliage: "The vision awaits its time;
hastens to the end." Until this time arrives,
I am content to sit and stare and climb.
I am compelled to bet my life on the fact
that this is the first work of revelation,
calling a tree tree, leaves leaves.
It is the good work of a scientist.
It is the hidden work of a common man.
I say its name like the bird who can't stop singing,
Ten Thousand Things In One, and then this prayer,
Om mani padme hum. The jewel is in the world.
I lie in the shade of its canopy
and listen to the genius above deny her name.
I turn its green to black in order to turn
it back again. I watch its fruit fall in the wind
like proofs for a law that only exists in the mind.
Like a well-stocked house it sustains me,
cleans my lungs with the distillation.
It is my home of transformation
where I remain and disappear.

Behold, The Lord God Bird
Hope is a bird that lives somewhere in a swamp,
unseen but there, like the tree that falls but needs
an ear to make a sound. The jizz of such
a thing is moot without the sighting of
a second birder. Everything we see
must strangely be stranger than what we imagine.
The flocks that fly through the sky of our dreams are hardly
as weird as the common sparrow, since she was spoken
and then translated. It's the words we want behind
the dream and the voice to say them, to make
them real and really strange, but cannot speak
for the length of our tongues. Be thankful, then, an angel
sings in the form of a bird that lived in memory's
overstory for sixty years. In the voice
of a clown at the top of a cypress. Kent! Kent!
she calls, then pauses for a while before resuming
her other song that echoes in our bones as if
they were trees in an ancient forest. Knock-knock!
Knock-knock! Only more and faster.