poetry: jonathan skinner

TENUOUS RELATION

"This year, for or the first time in memory, 
the monarch butterflies didn’t come . . . Last year’s low 
of 60 million seems great compared with the fewer
than three million that have shown up so far." / NY Times, Nov. 22, 2013 

terrific millionfold monarch migration 
in the forest of my youth in the filtered light 
of a morning I did not know was morning 
amidst populations I did not know would instruct me 
sexualized in the coupling force beyond mammal selection 
an electrical transmission below the level of sunlight 
filtered through towers of living monarch forests 
spinning cathedral glass exploded from axis 
a diagram of surfaces, light refracted 
into flocks of autonomous magnetic sensors 
spinning away and toward meridional centers 
hundreds of millions of representations 
each caught in the eco-swirl of its own sexual 
metabolic foraging exploratory hungers
the task is not to become cinematic 
for the screen here is exploded the data streams 
points of light humans waving their cells 
network engines humming data servers 
grounding the flock in some undisclosed location 
each click an ear of corn burning off the potential 
in massed hives of inequality the city humming 
with its "own" light that is not its own 
burning out the fields the wilderness of flowering 
medicinal intelligences shrinking the margin 
of attainability the growth gross surplus punishes 
straggling monarchs only seem weak until they are 
collapse of the network no more visible than its rise 
in the shadow of swarms who crowd source explore 
cycling inward but what do we counter
the task is not to become elegiac 
yet to remember clearly when there was light 
brought by other intelligences when the economic 
relations were already fucked nothing primary 
to experience but the orientation of the objects 
in this field of ontological relations massed evidence 
available to travelers catching the updraft 
of laboring hungering heat at colonial borders a boy 
could still hound me into those woods wanting 
a bit of change that wasn't in my pocket I could 
still be left alone with the flaming alien masses 
finally to catch a ride atop a load of resinous timber 
back of a truck loaded with logger exhaustion
in the slow economic violence not yet the terror of cartels
the task is to breathe in as well as out 
catching a bit of monarch fire in a gentle swarm 
in a Clear Creek Canyon above the Colorado 
below the towers of Zoroaster Temple, in the early light 
of a love whose extinction seemed impossible 
impossible as the solitary roving fluttering monarchs 
each minding its own tenuous relation minding me 
to care for the buried threads of now to then 
the spots of time and spaces stitched by migratory
desires, memory, all will power the free-fall struggles
down and up economical topographies of relation 
yet actual bodies blinking across the fossil landscape 
migratory swarming intelligences only dimly aware 
of their own orogenic and plate tectonic powers
the task is to honor the contact and the fire 
not the program, to be methodical in action 
doing our thing, basking in microclimates, longing 
for the heart of the heat of the sun of the swarm 
massed in genetic code, memories stored as images 
impulses, without which the sprayers roll in silence 
across fields of shining corn bundled and sheathed 
in cash-clad towers only seeming to be seeds 
the deadly vertical updraft of minerals and nutrients 
exhausting the soil in row after row of green 
desire unmixed by memory, an engineer's paradise 
in name only, behind every drone a man 
and paymaster, behind every monarch a million
who have always been relation the wing-clad 
boughs only seeming to be leaves but who notices 
when a network goes offline a constellation 
extinguished in the penumbra of failing telescopes
 

​Founder and editor of the influential journal ecopoetics, Jonathan Skinner is the author of Political Cactus Poems (2005), Warblers (2010), Birds of Tifft (2011), and Chip Calls (2014), and his essays have been anthologized widely. He teaches at the University of Warwick.