HAPPY PLANET

Mother Nature
Sends her silver seeds
To their new home in the sun

Neil Young, After the Gold rush

Yes they finally found one
A smiley face globe of rock
Much like our own beckoning us
Well once we’ve destroyed this one
Surely we can escape to that one
To think that great minds are
Actually contemplating this
We don’t have to care for our
Atmosphere green house gases
A lark so the icy poles disappear
While oceans devour the land
So what? Bees are gone as well as
80 percent of all species
We really miss those bees though
Because we really like to eat
Every day forests fall
Their beauty lying in the walls of
Huge vapid houses
Our sun hotter brighter
Melting the pot metal air into
Hot poisons
Now because of this happy planet
In Libra all we’ve got to do is
Pilgrimage 120 trillion miles
Of course its atmosphere may
Contain helium so that everyone
Talks funny but that just adds to
The party-like ambience that and
The giant red disk in the sky that is
Its sun painting everything a kind of
Mercurochrome orange
If we want daylight we must walk to
That side of the planet
If we demand sleep
We’ll need to walk back to the dark side
No rotation here at all
With temperatures as low as freezing
As high as sunstroke
Gravity here twice what it is on earth
Each footstep takes twice as much
Energy maybe water but no food
This planet spins itself around its
Carmine star once every thirteen days
Which means we will celebrate 29
Birthdays in what used to be one year
But premature aging a blessing there
A release from the exotic geology all
Around us from which there is no
Escape this monotony in scarlet
A cessation of the memories that taunt
Of the blue and green we once had
Before it was all purchased
Wadded up thrown away
 

YELLOW-LEGGED FROG

Crytid fungus stops the skins
Of amphibians from breathing
They suffocate
You can net every one
And plant healthy frogs in
The pond
It is all the same
Crytid fungus stops their skins
From breathing again
There is just something out there
That cannot be cured
Out to prey on all amphibians

Yosemite sits above the Central Valley
Pond on its green conifer lily pad
It too has a permeable skin
Poisons and toxins flow in around
And through
And so do the hundreds of thousands
Who go there for a breath of fresh air

As her skin grows thicker and viler
As her greens go brown and browns
Go silver as the mists all vanish in a
Heat haze
Yosemite leaps once twice
But there is no fresh pond in which
To land
And there will finally be no more leaping
 

VARIATIONS ON A FALLEN SEQUOIA

Straight pins and magnifying glass
A simple technology for telling
Age a concentric circular graph
Marking high tide of the world’s
Oceans and its effect on this grove
For eleven hundred and fifty-two years

Some slimmer some wider
Each ring pushing micrometers further
Into the world the quiet fact of your existence

At a thousand years
Galen Clark leaned against you to wipe
The sweat from his face
With an old blue bandana
On his first trip down from the Discovery tree
Leaned in your shade to sip cool water

Some ten rings later
John Muir extracted tannin from your
Cat face scar ink to write mellifluous poems
On vellum the elegant voices of Sequoia
Spoken through their own blood
That came to be their only salvation from the saw

Sweeping back to the fresh sun-dappled day
When your tiny cotyledon first broke duff
In the glorious botanical Eden that was
First the sea then the valley then the mountain
When primeval California was a place
That didn’t even dream the word California

Now you lie for 270 feet at length upon the earth
From which you grew Gone the generations of
Simple brown people who called you god the grizzly
The salmon the beaver one can almost see in your
Fibrous bark the ur-animals of the wild no longer here
But still you lie like a bridge for the next
Twelve hundred years and longer
Your children brushy and green in disturbed
Soil at your base and as the earth devours
You through millennia perhaps bitter air
From the west will once more sweetly flow