12/3/2019 poetry: jonathan skinnerTENUOUS 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.
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