Three Poems from Atlas
Softly clouded the trees, the air,
the linear body of water
upon the earth.
Unhurried against the line
of hills, in pasturage unbroken
the road marked among
the boulders.
The character
of the landscape or the fishes
of the Chumash, the wheat
and the cattle grazing
on the plain (what great
changes swept).
What tributaries drain the Santa
Susana Pass, the lower reaches
of Calleguas Creek shunted
into the lagoon, an estuary.
In green of beets and gold,
of stubble to the sea, the creek
a conduit to the sacred waters
of oceanic-blue, high velocity
for a lagoon.
What ancestral rings
of an older California,
of the shell middens
on the shore.
What breakthrough light
streaming out over
the wash.
• • •
To Brooklyn! this bridge
for Sonny Rollins
and the moving descendants
of migration, these trains
haunting the dogged trees of black,
of slow-rendered atmosphere,
skin impervious to the chill,
to the need to make every noun
a verb, nowhere the changes
more visible than here: a thin
wedge through the snowpile
of days.
You tarpapered rooftops with towers,
freezing wind buffeting
this pastiche of Brooklyn,
you full moon framed and tagged
big as a half-dollar:
step back to see the forms
accrete, to witness
no willing reality of mist,
this geography of drift dappled
with the aftereffects of drops,
their somber blurs cresting
bedrock, brachial branches
warning us away.
What sheaf of wondrous morning,
whipping roots of a sapling,
the stuff of snow that makes
no sound, this narrow state
of white against grey,
countless repercussions
in the vivid world.
• • •
For those who build houses,
take to the mountains,
axe to the sea.
The authority of the earth
on the brink of a great disaster,
of small bodies failing
with faint sounds
into the indifferent sky.
Realms of flight
and vantage of shore,
the secrets of the coast here.
A kinship
of quivering stones
through the summer air.
At rest
a flock of gulls
atop the undulating swell
just outside
the shore break.
The gift of twilight,
of necessary violence,
anger and outrage
and sea, the half moon
that never freezes.
With blood on a foot
of ground, the boulders of tide
opening the wild swan
of this world.
• • •
Originally from Southern California, Glenn Bach now lives in the Doan Brook watershed of Cleveland, Ohio. His major project, Atlas, is a long poem about place and our (mis)understanding of the world. Other excerpts have appeared in jubilat, Otoliths, Plumwood Mountain and others. He documents his work at glennbach.com and @AtlasCorpus.