Old Roads, New Stories: A Literary Series
Before this year’s Utah legislative session, I predicted that it wouldn’t be good, at least not in terms of environmental stewardship. Now that the session is over, let’s see if I was wrong: This year they passed 591 new bills, a state record. And the amazing news is that more than half of them were focused on restoring and protecting the Great Salt Lake!
Just kidding. Zero were.
Well, maybe one-and-a-half were. One aims to tighten some regulations on mineral extraction industries, hoping to better manage their water consumption. And another kicked in 1.5 million bucks to fund a study on improving water flow between Utah Lake and the Great Salt Lake. Out of a total budget of $29 billion, I know that doesn’t sound like much, but I suppose it depends on how you answer this question: Let’s say I’m sitting on $20,000, and you need some help paying your rent or paying for a hospital bill, so I take out my checkbook and write you a check for one dollar. How helpful vs. dickish do you think I’m being?
Anyway, I don’t think I was wrong back in January, although I very much wish I had been. But then February came around with a leap year this year, with a magic extra day, and I do like that—like a bonus moment to sit still, or wish, or talk back:
Every Four Years We Get an Extra Day for What?
If I were a saw, I’d cut wood with my teeth,
but I’m not.
If I were my yard, I’d grow grass instead of hair,
have trees instead of arms and shake hands with birds,
but I’m not.
I’m a man with a mind, heart, and language,
so I’ll speak:
A hundred crows can crash their voices into anything,
take fish away from an osprey,
drive stellar jays off of every fence post,
they’re still just crows.
I’d rather be corn and take my chances; corn has ears.
In Stout Grove, a temple of sequoias—
these thousand-year coastal redwoods thirty feet around—
I startled a mountain lion.
It turned from the road and was gone
in so much silent fern.
Like animal lightning in a deep-green sky.
If anyone ever kills it, he’ll have taken more wild beauty
than he can ever make.
He’ll owe the universe a cougar,
and I hope, in my too tame guts, he has to pay.
How can God, the size of all creation,
be buried alive in one book?—
we can’t even forecast the weather,
who’s fooling who?
How can salmon that spawned by the millions
and fed ten thousand bears
disappear in the power grid,
only swim a while longer up the channels of TV?
Or crows, the whole harangue of them,
so mistake their own croaking?
I mean people, of course,
people with their black rag hearts…
I’m just a man, not even an osprey,
and I can’t saw off what’s rotten,
but maybe there are still enough ears out there.
Maybe there’s still a language enough of us can speak.
Rob Carney’s first collection of creative nonfiction, Accidental Gardens, is out now from Stormbird Press, and his new book of poems, Call and Response, is available from Black Lawrence Press. Previous books include Facts and Figures, The Last Tiger is Somewhere, The Book of Sharks, and 88 Maps.
Read an interview with Rob Carney appearing in Terrain.org: “The Ocean is Full of Questions.”
Read Rob Carney’s Letter to America in Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, published by Terrain.org and Trinity University Press.
Read poetry by Rob Carney appearing in Terrain.org: 6th Annual Contest Finalist, 4th Annual Contest Winner, and Issue 30. And listen to an interview on Montana Public Radio about The Book of Sharks.
Header photo by matmoe, courtesy Pixabay.
