…is Punk. Rawk.

I’ve been on a dense Marxism reading kick, of late, and have been too absorbed in this and two other side projects to blog. I’ve been meaning to write about the Kalahari, and a critique of Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (inspired by my recent reading and by a posting on the anti-politics forum), and I hope to do both very soon.

On Tuesday, I finally got to Angel Island. Unfortunately, the Immigration Station is closed for renovations (see my recent post on this topic), so I couldn’t see any of the poems up close. They’ll be closed off to the public until late 2006. I did, however, get to do a geological tour, and wrote the following poem, which I’m still revising:

The Poetry of Proper Names

Above Perle’s Beach
where an outcropping of blueschist
marks the meeting of serpentine and pillow basalt,
it takes me four minutes — at least — to realise
that the bastard piece of the last-named (named,
no doubt, by a man who never walked on it) caught
in my shoe, is just a part
of all that.

(On the sand below
a harbour seal is dead,
strangled by a frayed length of rope and
with a hole in his side.
His eyes stare up into the sand and
his teeth growl down at the sun and
I do not know what to call this.)

I’m experimenting with metre. This does not yet do everything I want it to.

I met the fawn pictured above probably twice, though I’m not entirely sure it was the same dude. Angel Island’s been a state park for forty years, and, as it’s an island, the animals there have no idea how obnoxious humans can be. I got fifteen feet away from this guy, and was able to follow him for half an hour, maybe more. You can’t tell from the photo, but his fur is all mussed up, like he just rolled out of bed. He only squatted to dump when I aimed my camera — I did not know I was taking that picture until it was done.

I also got within ten feet of a gaggle of seven deer (some grown), five feet away from a racoon (didn’t want to get any closer!), and was followed along the beach by a sea lion. ‘Take me back / there often.’ — Corey Mesler

Informal interviews are giving me a picture of what I’m looking for. I think I’m going to submit a formal research proposal to myself next week.

This entry was posted on Friday, 21 October 2005 at 07:55 and is filed under Miscellanea. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.