The Red List

A Poem

Stephen Cushman

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780807156896
• eBook ISBN:
  9780807156919
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

The "red list" of Stephen Cushman's new volume of poetry is the endangered species register, and the book begins and ends with the bald eagle, a bird that bounded back from the verge of extinction. The volume marks the inevitability of such changes, from danger to safety, from certainty to uncertainty, from joy to sadness and back again. In a single poem that advances through wordplay and association, Cushman meditates on subjects as vast as the earth's fragile ecosystem and as small as the poet's own deflated fantasy of self-importance: "There aren't any jobs for more Jeremiahs."Simultaneously teasing the present and eulogizing what has been lost, Cushman speaks like a Shakespearean jester, freely and foolishly, but with penetrating insight.

PART 1

Endangerment’s foreplay en route to extinction
often but not always. Ask the bald eagle,
ridiculous nickname for that elegant hood
rhymed with its tail, a matched set distinctive
against distant spruce, white as the transit
of pre-dawn Jupiter’s super-heated drop
soldering sky plates to cement a meridian;
ask the white hoods about last-minute comebacks,
all but erased by really fine pesticide
but now off the red list and suddenly nemesis
to the gull population, herring or black-backed,
whose chicks make good snacks during long days of fishing.
Eagles increase, local gulls dwindle, till one day, who knows,
seeing an eagle skim low overhead, no bigger deal
than seeing a crow, so what, who cares, the national bird,
as in permit me to flip you the.
Move forward as the way opens.
But will the way open? Will the endangerments
prove passing fronts, slow-moving, stalled-seeming
for months, even years, but in the end ushering in
survival’s high pressure? Or is this the one
there’s no coming back from? And what kind of danger?
The one of tonight they’ll drag me away,
my remains in a pile of anonymous others,
or that of believing I have no connection
with someone who’s, what, fill in the blank,
male to my female, old to my young, light to my dark?
Connection, praise connection, I’m always connected,
says Hannah, 13, and there’s more life on line
than for those who are off, who don’t have a life
or really exist. Tell it, little sister, whatever one thinks
of eagles and Jupiter and a parallel universe
where nothing plugs in, the urge to exist
engines most urges from the gull and the eagle
all the way up to you who discriminate
between mere existence and really existing,
no exception made even for the urge,
when existence gets sickening, to endanger oneself.

Ooh, lighten up and give us a break
from these blocks of long lines, we don’t have all day
and no one’s entitled to jumbo attention
even from throwbacks who still can sustain it
instead of yakking on the phone while navigating traffic
or texting on the crapper or, Hannah, does this happen,
poring over some small screen while taking it from behind?
You’re too young to know, one assumes, and, boy,
your parents hope so, but that would be a question
arising from your assertion: Do the connected do it now
like sailors in rough weather, one hand for you,
one for your ship, that glowing device? Could be nice
in some ways, the distraction, perhaps, slowing things down
so no one lapses prematurely and two can synchronize,
thanks to messages back and forth,
RUT ILBL8 UT2L SRY B2W THNX

Dirty Martini

For this lip-reader
olive juice is hard to tell
from an I love you.

One’s distraction’s another’s aphrodisiac,
so who can say that connection here can’t enhance
connection there or that texting jimmy
while banging johnny won’t turn all on
and move the earth
as the earth moved Tuesday,
day before yesterday, 5.9 on Richter’s scale,
Charles Francis, born in Ohio, Hello,
I’m a seismologist, what about you,
are you a seismologist too, as if getting paid
to track our temblors weren’t cool enough,
you also get to say I’m a seismologist,
never felt the earth move? here lemme help,
don’t speak English? no problema, sismo,
Erdbeben, maanjäristys, tremblement de terre,
whatever you call it it jostles us all
thirty miles from epicenter, teenage kid
with three life sentences, middle-age lady
with daily radiation on top of her chemo,
premature baby urgently delivered
to intensive attention, and connects us all
for thirty seconds, even someone standing
alone in the woods while the woods roar and rumble
the sign sufficient, the message received.

The national bird,
Washington’s white monument,
has closed for a crack.

Wonder what the eagle’s doing
to ready for the hurricane, prophesied for Sunday
and bearing a name that might make one ask
if people paid to christen storms, yet another job to envy,
have anhydrous senses of humor or nasty knacks for irony
or plain don’t know Irene means peace; it’s sure peaceful now,
blue morning in the buff, not the fig leaf of a cloud,
not a single stitch of wind, for the forty she’s left dead,
the bozo on the Outer Banks who thought it boss to surf,
the guy who fried while wading to save a small girl stranded
by waters hiding wires, the many hapless felled by trees
crashing in windows, dropping on rooftops, swatting cars
like blood-puffed mosquitoes. What are you supposed to do?
Act like a bozo, something may happen; act like a hero,
something may happen. But sitting quiet in your room,
minding your own beeswax, when suddenly, pow, you’re history
gives Pascal the lie. Death, Leading Causes of:
accidents rank third for men, for women sixth, but rule out
anything having to do with booze or with some kind of machine,
narrow it to nature, in her high assassin mode, e.g., falling tree,
falling coconut, lightning strike, landslide, avalanche,
tornado, flash flood, earthquake, tidal wave, meteor debris,
and the number must be pretty small, especially for those,
neither bozos nor heroes, who keep to little rooms
meekly hoping to miss misfortune. And yet it happens;
shut-in, agoraphobe, convict under house-arrest,
the deeply depressed who sleep all day with sad heads covered
share endangerment, too. Wonder what the eagle’s doing.

The white fog covers
island contours like the sheets
drawn over faces.

Move forward as the way opens. And if it can’t open
beside the sea or in the woods, perhaps it opens,
in project or penthouse, trailer park or tract development,
with a story instead. Today another aftershock, 3.4;
yesterday the queen of Sheba came to test Solomon
with spices by the camel-load, gold and flashy stones,
but he answered her questions, showed her his stuff,
lots more opulent than hers, knocked the wind right out of her
before he sent her home again with all she could desire.
Odd transaction. What’s her game? Show him up? Put him down?
Is this how monarchs pass the time? A shrewd investor,
maybe she figured on a good return in a bearish market:
Bring King Solomon X in gifts, your retinue groaning,
and you go home with ten times X. Or maybe she was angling
to make herself his newest wife, number seven hundred and one,
not exactly top of the heap but possibly a notch or two above
any one of his three hundred concubines. Or maybe she really
needed his help with questions she couldn’t answer, like Why,
if you’re smitten with foreign women, haven’t you come to me?
Am I so ugly? Look at this; take a peek at those. Here we go
into apostasy, hand in hand, just say the word and we can build
a very high place for my abomination. If so, did he say no,
and she chose to attribute a failed seduction to something
she called wisdom? Solomon’s sharp, no doubt about it,
that prayer for discernment ranks near the top,
as does his judgment between the two harlots, and don’t forget
he built the temple. But all the excess, whether in women
or conspicuous consumption, while slobbering after other gods
when one was taking such good care of him,
doesn’t feel much like wisdom. Good story, though.
And thinking it over surely beats heck out of sitting around
making big idols out of one’s problems. If you ever have trouble
distinguishing the queen of Sheba from Bathsheba, Solomon’s mom
and his dad’s first big transgression, just remember David saw
BATHsheba in her BATH. Careful: This trick won’t work
in Hebrew, Greek, or Latin.

Things not lost today:
any weight, a tooth, my nerve.
Praise the plus column.

But does the eagle, its branch-nest humming atop a dead spruce
with chirpy eaglets hankering for fish, herring or mackerel
so fresh it was swimming just minutes ago, until the big swoop,
too fast to be fell, snagged it from the full-moon flood tide,
ever give an eaglish thought to whether or not to leave them alone?
Come on; confess. If you’re an eagle, you rank pretty high
on the shoreline food chain and don’t worry much about ending up
as somebody’s lunch. And who could manage to raid that nest,
weighing in at a metric ton, when adults usually guard it?
But one of the parents could up and die and then the survivor
would be in a bind, having to exit to bring home the mackerel
while junior’s defenseless. Helpless. Endangered.

Yellow-haired boy arms to the sky in yellow fall light
chasing to catch yellow leaves flying.

I remember saying
you will remember this.
Now I remember this.

So many mysteries, no wonder detective fiction
has been so delectable ever since Daniel, in defense of Susanna,
cross-examined witnesses, or Oedipus, insistent,
sent for the shepherd, or Scheherazade’s Three Apples story.
Who can’t admire Auguste Dupin, Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot?
Or the great Chief Inspector, who cracked many cases
while fathering analysis? But Freud had his blind spots,
among them a mystery beyond solution, so of course he belittled
religion as illusion; our largest spirits have never believed
in the God he didn’t believe in either. What a low bar:
diss the divine into trivial silliness and then call it silly.
Talk about illusion: ideas of God are childish
so God is childish and doesn’t exist? What logic primer
did he find that in? Grow up. You’ve finally figured out
God’s not Santa Claus, a school principal hot to suspend you,
or your personal short-order cook? Good for you. Congratulations.
How does it feel to graduate from kindergarten?
Hope you do as well in first grade. Easy, Cush.
Unemployment’s high and there aren’t any jobs for more Jeremiahs.

In my trilogy
of sky and shore, wind and sea,
this is volume three.

So many mysteries, no wonder some like detective fiction;
solutions comfort, especially when mysteries come
with a copious side order of brain-dicing pain. But others?
Others may find investigation too exhausting
and opt themselves out of intractable inquiry:
When did this happen? Who did this to you? What do you remember?
Maybe it’s better to kill the day in bed, skip the medication,
say you’ve been robbed of a certain kind of life,
one that sadness doesn’t disfigure and force underground
out of the light of others’ attentions, out of the headlines,
the prizes, the raises, the perks of looking good or doing well.
Or maybe detection, even successful, doesn’t diminish
the deficit of hopelessness, so why bother trying?
Maybe, could it be, hopelessness is ecstasy?

Red leaf in the road.
This place will shake my dust off.
Crickets effervesce.

Ecstasy. There’s a subject that’s lots more fun
than spending a morning in General District Court
with shoplifters, trespassers, fishers without licenses,
inmates in jumpsuits who hobble to the bench in shackles
where the clean-cut judge, who doesn’t sound judgmental,
denies them bond for risk of flight. Ecstasy. Much better
but in its way as complicated, variegated, unless you settle
for euphoria, bliss, exalted delight as adequate synonyms
and let it go at that, eager for the next installment, please.
But if the Greek means displacement from senses,
how can you settle for synonyms like those? So many ways
to end up displaced. The young man angry
at how his folks flubbed, ruin...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• CONTENTS
• PART 1
• PART 2
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS