DENNIS CAMIRE

 

Magnifying Glass

 

How shame magnifies the day

my older brother and friends

aimed the condensed arrow of light

at the bull’s eyes’ of ant abdomens

until beady bodies smoked while

re-treating along the pheromone-

laced path back to underground

 

hive.  How I writhed like these

innocent, incinerated insects

as older peers then wrestled over

control of this soulless, solar laser

and pondered if beetles, frogs,

or even groundhogs, could be

crucified by this cruelty. But when

 

this blacktop of a holocaust lost

its charm after a dozen slaughters 

they pressed the primitive laser

into my sweat-soaked right palm

to initiate myself into the tribe

of male teens where inflicting harm

was the means of building bonds

 

as strong as that between

a battle-tested army. And, though,

 in science, I was marveling over

some ants’ evolving two stomachs

to fill up and feed sisters tending

the queen deep in the hive—and though

I gaped, over the blind species,

 

still foraging and tunneling in

perfect accord via the sublime

pheromones wafting into my

very nose, I held the lens over

 

the blessed insects, then slowly

closed the circle of light into

that pinprick of nuclear fission

 

triggering the charred carnage

I’d commit to win approval’s giggles

before the circle of young men

was closing around my beady body

and their warm pats of my back

and offers to hang out Saturday night

felt, for a while, like love, like

 

the first hints

of a great

l

i

g

h

t.

 

First Whitetail Deer

 

Though legally blind, my grandfather arrives

With his macular degenerative eyes to admire

My buck’s” barrel chest and hefty hind legs”—

 

Though, I know, in porch light, he only espies

feint shapes of torso and head and is relying, instead,

On the braille of gripped, eight-point antlers 

 

To guess at the “great girth and thick loins”

 he waxes poetic on yet doesn’t quite discern.

Still, thinking how he faltered like a shot buck

 

in the wake of his eye-doctor’s mortal verdict,      

I embrace going blind to the reality of his blindness

 and agree about “the beauty of the white stripe”

 

he claims to admire “flowing down Its extra-long neck.”

And though, one day I may go blind, in kind, sight, I see,

comes from the trinity of mind, memory, and eyes;

 

And, praise then, how I’ll forever glean that day

where my father, now, steered the conversation

to deer parts the old man’s hands could translate

 

so, as we stood there in our carnival of marvel

beaming about the coat’s thick, winter-ready follicles

And of the musk glands behind the shins to entice

 

the does-in-heat close, he could share in this

festive moment where, as the moon opened her one eye

to pirate the night, we let him reach  inside the

 

chest cavity to feel for and remove the heart

he held up like a north star and could honestly marvel

over the slight warmth it still contained before

 

my hunter’s rite of passage of biting into the solemn organ

and the grace in having to close my perfect eyes

to fully savor the deer’s wild, delicious taste.

 

The City Under Siege

For Years Suddenly Realizes

 

that Birds have Abandoned Her Borders

--After listening to NPR about a play being performed in a war-torn city in

 Serbia—

 

By fall, they long for the abandoned nests

signifying a past gentleness that coaxed

chickadees to mate by open windows then

perch on clothes lines. Soon, though,

 

 wagers are made on what species

will be the first to signal a return of peace:

Biblical dove or regal eagle circling?

Later, the town poet notes there’s no word

 for a bird-less world but fails to gerrymander

 

some grand, Germanic polysyllabic verb

for that epic lacking. Still, when it’s learned

earth holds sixty-two birds per person,

hope roosts on a professor’s equation

where peace is induced in restoring

 

twenty? Or thirty birds? Per human 

within their borders. Slowly, now,

locals dream of amity restored

by an amazing flock of peacocks

parading down main street

 

with their royal flush of tail feathers

imbibed by the scopes of snipers

and the binoculars of colonels.

And mothers who’ve lost sons

seek to heal by carving feeders

 

and dreaming of a return of feathers slowly

burying their grief. And imagine, now,

how word passenger pigeons of a city

where birds are barometers of peace

and hundreds of peace-nicks wake

 

imitating the mating calls of sparrow,

owl, or jay. And consider the loving Intent

in so silos of bird seed filling feeders waiting

for wings to again heartbeat bay windows.

And how lovely (in this age of avian

 

genocide) for the picture books of birds to fly

off shelves for children who, though yet to espy

a single raven, thrush, or cardinal, still save us

with their Birds of Paradise eyes flapping over

the pages of herons and bobolinks lit by the

 

seamless light of a clear, abandoned, blue sky.

 

The Hatchery Worker

In The Wake Of His Broken Engagement

 

Now the schools of fingerlings—slipping

          Through his net--become her lost affections

While the maturing sockeyes portend

 

His own pending journey through

           The rapids of emotions awaiting one

Who’ll delay, so long after losing a soul-

 

Mate, his return to dating. Soon, though,

            He commits to a second year of draining

And scouring holding ponds and troughs

 

For the way the labor purges loss

                  And provides the emptiness needed

    For the bloodstream, he prays, to restock

 

With like protein-rife feelings to thrive

          In the heart’s pristine, native waterways.

And honeymooning years later along

 

The very rivers and streams he did stock,

              He’ll gaze at returned Cohoes seeking mates

Then marvel over his own epic migration

 

From grief’s vast, briny estuary to the

                    Fresh, mountain stream of possibility….

Until, nights, swelling with such gratitude

 

Over the deep bond forged inside

                          That shallow pool of a “speed date,”

He’ll sing of squeezing silt from a belly

 

Restoring his belief in self-regeneration

            Before musing, streamside, on true love being

This native waterway we, too, find late in life

 

Despite how the scent of it rides in

              And out with the tides of our every desire.

No wonder, gray haired, decades later,

 

He’s grateful for the grueling journey

                             To their love’s own pristine pools

where their last orgasms find them running

 

Fingers over their like, arched spines

                  While thinking of all the unseen rainbows

Blooming over the sexed sockeye’s backside

 

The deeper they swim into their final days

                           where, dying and floating down-

Stream, they, too, abide in love’s afterglow.

 

The Landscape

Lexicographer Laments

 

“Scholars, I plead with you/ where are your

dictionaries of the wind”

--Norman MacCraig—

 

He laments how landscapes go unloved

then lost when ancient words for sceneries

And weathers are forgotten

So “rionnach maoim’s” looming extinction

Means few moorland ramblers

Will see “those rivers of shadows

Flowing at your feet as clouds

Pass over on a sunny, blustery day.”

 

And then there’s the endangered species

Of so much colorful, local speech

Where only buzzed, Ulster fishermen

Sizzle with the word “crizzle”

When insisting there’s “a feint sound

Water makes when hard-en-ing

Into ice….” Still poets, he knows,

Create these wild preserves

 

For rare, dying words to thrive

Beneath the Pyrenees peaks of their

Etymologies.  And so combing through

The Gaelic anthologies, he dreams

Of that lost lexicon for the infinite

Variations of highland canyon fog—

Or, maybe say, a forgotten thesaurus

for old growth forests whose barks’ primal braille,

 

alone, surely can set the mind awhirl

with wonder words. But for now,

no scholar or non-profit is petitioning

to preserve “glassel’s” rare word of paradise

 

So future beach combers have a term

For “that smooth seaside pebble

Which, when wet, was shiny and inspiring

But, after taking home, is now just

 

A lump of stone….” And so our word-hoard

endures this Amazon-like extirpation of words

By revisiting “The Peat Bog Glossary’s”

Two-hundred-plus terms for moss.

And between sips of single malt scotch

 he curses the new Junior OED replacing

buttercup,  heron, mistletoe, and Hopkin’s kingfisher

So kids are fluent in the “consensus reality”

 

Of chatroom, broadband, cut n paste

And celebrity….Oh, but bless his quest

To re-wild our English “blandscape”

Inspiring a few wordsmiths to work

The rare forgotten term of “eit”

Into the coho salmon documentary

So more folks might imagine

“That sheening quartz villagers set

 

In the stream to reflect moonlight

And attract salmon back to

Their nets.” And as he explores,

now, tomes of Icelandic Sagas

And ancient Doric translations,

May we reacquire our taste

For the venison-like verbs

Of the old vernaculars

 

So “blinter’s” rare songbird of word

Might once more soar when seeking

To articulate “the radiance of stars

On a clear cold winter night.”

And may our bards and artists restore

these ten-thousand vanishing species

of speech so each future child

can utter Hopkins’s “haze-fire”

 

To “the luminous morning mist

Through which the rising sun is

Shining poetic” and know, finally,

the amazing power of nouns!

Think, now, of the vast ecosystem

Of speech regreening if following

this Thoreau of thesauruses

And exhaling “endolphin”

 

To celebrate “that happy

chemical release when diving

into the ocean surf.” How lovely to think

some verdant Eden might slowly be

restored by simply decreeing “Plato’s fire”

when seeing “light dancing inside

a tree hollow on a sunny day.”

How heartening to imagine

 

We might return to the

good graces of some God of Gaia

when merely noticing “those autumn spiders’

shining filaments of web spun across

swaths of horizon at dawn or dusk”

and softly declaiming to maple,

crow, north facing moss, or …..God?

 glossomer, glossomer, glossamer….

 

DENNIS CAMIRE