Sandbank Burrows
We’re doxxed and stalked, a matter of degree
“Deletion has never existed” (Edward Snowden, Permanent Record)
Before dawn mid-September, Bubo virginian us hooting to the east-southeast
Frequently now on late-summer nights, Megascopsasio close by too, due south
The most exciting owl encounter is to see snowy owls imaged in an open field, immobile and filtered by blowing snow
They’re enigmatic markers placed there, like glacial erratics in bad light or through ground mist or fog, those stones and boulders carried and left by the ice sheets
As there are on a stellar scale the erratics of our galactic neighborhood
One erratic, 51 Pegasi a star with a planet in orbit, so far has led to the dramatic findings of over four thousand more exoplanets within our Galaxy, the Milky Way
Now consider the near infinity of the stars of other galaxies and those stars’ planets
“I’m falling upward, nothing to hold me down.” (Jane Kenyon)
Adagio adagio
La intrincadavida
La magníficavida y un pensativovida
Universally owl encounters also are sobering
Their eyes and ultra-serious mien
Have never seen the two biggest ones, the Eurasia eagle owl Bubo bubo, and the boreal great gray owl and its deep pumping whoops
Once a huge hawklike owl glimpsed flying in moonlit mist at a river ford in the mountains of Flores was probably a brown hawk owl having a mellow double note call
Have seen burrowing owls in the Pantanal in daylight sitting by sandbank burrows, and watched diminutive northern saw-whets unmoving and unblinking on daylight roosts
An emphatic for all owls is a plumage in variants, white from warm brown to ashy
In the manner of serious tout noir Europeans dressed not all in black but nearly so
Color of conformity and gloom
Unexpressive figures in long dark coats and walking alone on wet pavements with single-shouldered thin city backpacks
People driving alone in smallish cars is also very European
And every fifth person across Germany lives alone
Something to do with béton brut
Architecture controls lives
Historic civic order imposed, as if in the manner of sumpturary legality
Like Stolpersteine, on residential streets in Berlin but not in Munich, the reason not the Bavarian Right but a veto from Munich’s Jewish community of the names of murdered Jews being stepped on
If they had not already left, there was no escape then for Jews
As the principal electronic vehicle of our twenty-first century surveillance has been XKEYSCORE aka XKS, with more recent more go-deeper programs
“You could read anyone’s email in the world, anybody you’ve got an email address for. Any website: You can watch traffic to and from it. Any computer that an individual sits at: You can watch it. Any laptop that you’re tracking: you can follow it as it moves from place to place throughout the world.” (Edward Snowden already in January 2014)
Edward Snowden’s isolate Moscow life
Within the internet ocean, surveillance is like the Gulf Stream moving more water than all of the world’s rivers combined
Deep stream
“From now on every major writer will have to forge his or her language, a language which of course lives off the vernacular of his or her own time, but to which we have to grow acclimatized” (Gabriel Josipovici, TLS, August 9, 2019)
To Gerald Stern and his trees and to Les Murray in the presence of cows
To Carolyn Kizer’s compassion and John Kinsella’s “as if balanced on gyroscopes”
“The present moment that lives on to become long ago” (Gary Snyder)
The quality of gone
As nicotine smokers in this country are down to fifteen percent, deeply rooted male chauvinist views slip toward a similar decline
Among the buttoned up and bemused as well as with cohorts of the pierced tattooed
As the old trans-America voyage of parking on Main Street, stretching out your legs before getting something to eat, then driving west out of town and be gone
“the way they went is all that is still there” (W. S. Merwin, “Sheep Passing”)
The way it went with so much else that was compelling and picturesque
As the nostalgia quotient of what has been flushes up with age accrued
“…falling upward”
Recent pasts like docuseries on population explosion or global warming without color
Fast like old black and white newsreels
As a pistol shot in the back of the head the common mode of Soviet political execution
As distain and dismissal was the way of the world and not being able to show as white meant relegation
As the hopelessness of driven-out bombed-out fired-out and ignored Middle Eastern, Latin American, African and Asian refugees
In their consummate sadness
Leaving with their children
“Deletion has never existed” (Edward Snowden, Permanent Record)
Before dawn mid-September, Bubo virginian us hooting to the east-southeast
Frequently now on late-summer nights, Megascopsasio close by too, due south
The most exciting owl encounter is to see snowy owls imaged in an open field, immobile and filtered by blowing snow
They’re enigmatic markers placed there, like glacial erratics in bad light or through ground mist or fog, those stones and boulders carried and left by the ice sheets
As there are on a stellar scale the erratics of our galactic neighborhood
One erratic, 51 Pegasi a star with a planet in orbit, so far has led to the dramatic findings of over four thousand more exoplanets within our Galaxy, the Milky Way
Now consider the near infinity of the stars of other galaxies and those stars’ planets
“I’m falling upward, nothing to hold me down.” (Jane Kenyon)
Adagio adagio
La intrincadavida
La magníficavida y un pensativovida
Universally owl encounters also are sobering
Their eyes and ultra-serious mien
Have never seen the two biggest ones, the Eurasia eagle owl Bubo bubo, and the boreal great gray owl and its deep pumping whoops
Once a huge hawklike owl glimpsed flying in moonlit mist at a river ford in the mountains of Flores was probably a brown hawk owl having a mellow double note call
Have seen burrowing owls in the Pantanal in daylight sitting by sandbank burrows, and watched diminutive northern saw-whets unmoving and unblinking on daylight roosts
An emphatic for all owls is a plumage in variants, white from warm brown to ashy
In the manner of serious tout noir Europeans dressed not all in black but nearly so
Color of conformity and gloom
Unexpressive figures in long dark coats and walking alone on wet pavements with single-shouldered thin city backpacks
People driving alone in smallish cars is also very European
And every fifth person across Germany lives alone
Something to do with béton brut
Architecture controls lives
Historic civic order imposed, as if in the manner of sumpturary legality
Like Stolpersteine, on residential streets in Berlin but not in Munich, the reason not the Bavarian Right but a veto from Munich’s Jewish community of the names of murdered Jews being stepped on
If they had not already left, there was no escape then for Jews
As the principal electronic vehicle of our twenty-first century surveillance has been XKEYSCORE aka XKS, with more recent more go-deeper programs
“You could read anyone’s email in the world, anybody you’ve got an email address for. Any website: You can watch traffic to and from it. Any computer that an individual sits at: You can watch it. Any laptop that you’re tracking: you can follow it as it moves from place to place throughout the world.” (Edward Snowden already in January 2014)
Edward Snowden’s isolate Moscow life
Within the internet ocean, surveillance is like the Gulf Stream moving more water than all of the world’s rivers combined
Deep stream
“From now on every major writer will have to forge his or her language, a language which of course lives off the vernacular of his or her own time, but to which we have to grow acclimatized” (Gabriel Josipovici, TLS, August 9, 2019)
To Gerald Stern and his trees and to Les Murray in the presence of cows
To Carolyn Kizer’s compassion and John Kinsella’s “as if balanced on gyroscopes”
“The present moment that lives on to become long ago” (Gary Snyder)
The quality of gone
As nicotine smokers in this country are down to fifteen percent, deeply rooted male chauvinist views slip toward a similar decline
Among the buttoned up and bemused as well as with cohorts of the pierced tattooed
As the old trans-America voyage of parking on Main Street, stretching out your legs before getting something to eat, then driving west out of town and be gone
“the way they went is all that is still there” (W. S. Merwin, “Sheep Passing”)
The way it went with so much else that was compelling and picturesque
As the nostalgia quotient of what has been flushes up with age accrued
“…falling upward”
Recent pasts like docuseries on population explosion or global warming without color
Fast like old black and white newsreels
As a pistol shot in the back of the head the common mode of Soviet political execution
As distain and dismissal was the way of the world and not being able to show as white meant relegation
As the hopelessness of driven-out bombed-out fired-out and ignored Middle Eastern, Latin American, African and Asian refugees
In their consummate sadness
Leaving with their children