Transitory, Momentary

The Brent geese fly in long low wavering lines on their migrations.

They start in western Europe, fatten in Iceland, then fly over the

Greenland ice cap to Canada. They sometimes breed on the Arctic

coasts of central and western Siberia and winter in western Europe,

some in England, the rest in Germany and France. What I have to

offer here is nothing revolutionary. They learn the map from their

parents, or through culture rather than through genetics. It is just an

observation, a small observation that sometimes art can hold the oil

wars and all that they mean and might yet mean within. Just as

sometimes there are seven stanzas in a song. And just as sometimes

there is a refrain between each stanza. And just as often this sort of

song tells a certain sort of story, one about having something and then

losing it. Just as sometimes the refrain of a song is just one word said

four times. Just as sometimes the word is huge, sometimes coming

from a machine and yet hitting in the heart; uplifting and ironic and

big enough to hold all these things in its four syllables. Just as some-

times, often even, it contradicts, and thus works with, the stanzas. Just

as the police clear out yet another public space and yet another camera

follows along behind. Just as the stream has no narration, only ambient

noise. And the police move slowly, methodically in a line as if they are

a many-legged machine. They know what they are doing. It is their

third time clearing the park and they will clear it many more times and

then they will win and a building will be built where there once was

the park. In this song, as is true of many songs, it is unclear why the

singer has lost something, maybe someone. In this time, the time of

the oil wars, there are many reasons that singers give for being so lost.

Often they are lost because of love. Sometimes they are lost because of

drugs. Sometimes they have lost their country and in their heart it feels

as if they have lost something big. And then sometimes they are lost

just because they are in Bakersfield. Really though they are lost

because in this time song holds loss. And this time is a time of loss.

The police know, as they move through the park yet one more time,

that they will win and a building will be built on the space. But right

now, the building is not there. All that is there are the police and

debris and the police deal with the debris. They push over book-

shelves, open up boxes and look inside, tear into tents, awkwardly, the

poles springing. They are only there to see if any humans remain.

Tomorrow the bulldozers will push the debris into big piles and load it

into trucks. The police wear white helmets and short sleeves under

their kevlar vests. For many years the Brent geese ate eelgrass, but once

the eelgrass was gone to the wasting disease and the estuaries filled,

they moved inland to agricultural lands and began eating grasses and

winter-sown cereals. The Brent geese are social, adaptable. They fly

around together, learning from each other, even as these groups are

often unstable, changing from season to season. Songs in their most

popular versions tend to be epiphanic, gorgeous with swelling chord

changes, full of lament too. And this song, like many, expresses the

desire to be near someone who is now lost. It travels as something

layered, infiltrated, unconfused with its refusals to make a simple

sense. I want to give you this song sung in a bar in Oakland one night

during the ongoing oil wars. The singer had clearly been lost once, but

they sang as someone who eventually got in the car and drove out of

Bakersfield, perhaps early in the morning, the sun just starting to rise,

or perhaps later after sun-up, the light washing out everything in

Bakersfield as the sun is wont to do there. Eventually they arrived to

sing this song. This might have taken them many years. There was

nothing that implied that the lostness was recent. But the lostness, it

was clear, was huge and had been experienced fully by them. It

probably doesn't matter where the sun was that day in Bakersfield

when they got in the car. It probably just matters that there is a sun,

still, and they got in the car and drove, drove through the oil fields with

their wells pumping out amber colored oils and their refineries with

tall towers that heat the oil so as to sort its various viscosities, and drove

through the black cloud that is the slow constant burn of the oil wars.

Then at some point they were in Oakland. The oil near Bakersfield is

heavy but it often benchmarks against the Brent blend. Brent blend is

a light crude oil, though not as light as West Texas Intermediate. It

contains approximately 0.37% of sulphur, classifying it as sweet crude,

yet not as sweet as West Texas Intermediate. When the park is cleared

and the building is built, it will headquarter an oil company. When

this oil company named their oil fields off the coast of Scotland, they

choose the names of water birds in alphabetical order: Auk, Brent,

Cormorant, Dunlin, Eider, Fulmar, and so on. Brent is also an

acronym for the Jurassic Brent formation that makes up the Brent

oilfield, for Broom, Rannoch, Etive, Ness, and Tarbert. About two

thirds of oil is benchmarked against what is called the Brent Crude Oil

Spot price. Petroleum suppliers in Europe, Africa and the Middle East

often price their oil according to Brent Crude's value on the Interconti-

nential Exchange if it is being sold to the West. The Brent Crude Oil

Spot price is set in dollars, maintained by force, endlessly manipulated

by commodity futures markets. The refrain is the moment when the

singer makes it clear that they understand something about what is

being lost. It was obvious they had lost their country, it being taken

over by bankers and all. They had clearly been rejected. Loved too

much and gotten too little of it back in return, many times. But none

of this matters, it was obvious, in comparison to what is now being lost

for that night even though the song is about a minor loss, about the loss

of tongue on clit or cock, the singer seemed to understand s0mething

about the other things that are lost. While a formation of police clear

the far side of the park of the debris of its occupation, another forma-

tion of police on the other side shoot the new gasses, the ones we do

not yet know by name, into another part of the park where people are

now clustered. This camera has sound and every few seconds there is a

pop. It is unevenly steady. The song is just about two people who are

not near each other, who have probably chosen not to be near each

other any more. The song reflects and refracts the oil in ways both

relevant and trivial in how it tells about what happens when one lets

love go, when one gives up the tongue. It might be that only through

the minor we can feel enormity. It might be that there is nothing to

epiphany if it does not hint at the moment of sweaty relation larger

than the intimate. For what is epiphanic song if it doesn't spill out and

over the many that are pulled from intimacies by oil's circulations?

The truckers, the sailors and deckhands, the assembly line workers,

those who maintain the pipelines, those who drive support in the

caravans that escort the tankers, the fertilizers, the thousands of

interlocking plastic parts, the workers who move two hundred miles

and live in a dorm near a factory, alone, those on the ships who spend

fifty weeks circulating with the oil unable to talk to each other because

of no shared language and so are left only with two weeks in each year

where they can experience the tongue in meaningful conversation. A

life that is only circulations. Before the police come, before the

building, in the middle of one night, a group of people form a line

leading to the entrance of the park. Or several groups form several

lines, all leading to the entrance. Some wear medical masks. Some

wear glasses too. All pass bricks, one by one, down the line so as to

make a pile. They are silent for the most part, silent enough that it is

possible to hear the bricks make a clink as they fall. The pile gets

bigger and bigger. It is waist high. Then chest high. Some get out of

the line and climb on the pile, hold both their hands in the air because

they know now is the transitory, momentary triumph and it should be

felt. Others continue passing brick after brick, from one hand to

another hand, arms extended, torsos at moments also going back and

forth with the bricks. When they run out of bricks, the pile is topped

with fencing. Then they gather behind it, waiting. Back there, some-

one might possibly be singing to a child, singing the epiphanic song

that alludes to losing the moment of tongue on clit or cock over and

over because the child cannot be comforted, because the singer knows

only loss. The room will be dark. The light will be on in the hall.

There will be shadows, in other words. And the singer will know about

these shadows at this moment and know they had agreed to be with

shadows when they had the child. They had gambled in a sense on a

question of sustaining. They had agreed to exist from now on with a

shadow. A shadow of love and a shadow of the burning of the oil fields that

has already happened and is yet to come and yet must come and a million

other shadows that might possibly disappear in the light at that moment.

Source: That Winter the Wolf Came (Commune Editions, 2015)

Poetry and the Environment