It is hard, these days, to not feel like a passenger on a runaway train, speeding towards some unknown horizon while the world as we recognize it disappears in the rear view. It may be an opportunity, as many of us hope, to rebuild something better, but there is no escaping that the collateral damage done in the meantime is nothing short of devastating. It is hard to shake the feeling that we don’t have any control, that this devastation unfolding is unstoppable.
Barry Lopez said, “The land gets inside of us; and we must decide one way or another what this means, what we will do about it.” In The Place That Is Coming to Us, J.D. Smith shepherds us through his homeland that clearly remains inside of him: the Chesapeake Bay Watershed.
In the opening poem, “Introit”, we see this home from the view of a returning emigrant. What is familiar and what has been made unfamiliar in his absence, recalling Thomas Wolfe’s axiom, “you can’t go home again.”
So, too, for those
who have made a life in but one land.
The seasons stutter, or change places,
the clouds’ scripts are blurred
and rain’s rhythms broken
without a prospect of remaking.
Vermin appear where there is no word for them.
Blossom, flock, hibernator are shaken,
and all with them, on seeing
the place that is coming to us.
And it seems this is the fate we are all facing, as the landscapes we love are changed by human actions and inaction, by our desires for comforts that only serve us and not those we share space with.
In his seventh poetry collection, we find an elegy for all that we are losing, sharp criticism for the capitalist pursuit that is driving the destruction, and a glimpse at what the future might hold for us. And, appropriate to the subject, this is an economical book of brief pieces in which no word is wasted. Smith’s language is of urgency. It is crafted, but not clever, precise and cutting, clear and descriptive.
Throughout the collection, without sentimentality but not without tenderness, Smith includes poems that demonstrate his deep relationship with the place in elegies for the non-human inhabitants of the place. These poems help serve as reminders that there is still beauty worth saving.
In “At Longwood Gardens,” the speaker, while acknowledging dragonflies as common characters in poems, also captures the singularity experienced by watching the dragonflies hovering above the water.
Everything has been said about dragonflies
and their damsel, darning needle kin—
the quartet wings, bowsprit heads,
lengthy coupling in flight—
but how much, today, about this
iridescent specimen that swerves
and hovers barely above water
as if its kind hadn’t done so
since times of dinosaurs and giant ferns?
This sort of attention and mindfulness is woven into the collection and contrasts the skepticism with which the speaker regards the human world. There is a similar reverence of other species, including sea jellies, bats, various birds, and other living things. In the poem, “Mushrooms”, this admiration is perhaps most apparent.
They are of the nature of brilliance:
from nowhere, or between places, untilan August rain and dark hours
raise their society.Buttons that emerge privately
in the salons of grasses,then draw moist encouragement
silently sipping at dew, sipping at the water table—that springs sudden caps into light
where they cantilever, stems thickened,flaunt veils for the world to see,
and swell, grown gregarious,waving colors to one another
at a distance, form clumps and bunches,gather in troupes and circles, still swelling.
A few, drunk on humus,stoop to consuming stumps,
or scale trees toward bracket cousins.By sunset skins of all shades split,
peeling from growththey cannot shape or shield, releasing
flesh to its contortions in the airas prescient gills flare, freeing spores
in soil and windbefore a clear night and dry dawn leave
the flaked ash of a humid fire.
Here, as in the other poems referenced, we see Smith using language most generously, taking time to gift us these gorgeous descriptions of the world around us.
Very early in the collection, in “Desideratum”, a speaker describes a vault they would like to live in, and through Smith’s terse language, we see it as the cold, empty vessel for only things, things that only matter through some arbitrary desire of the speaker.
I would like to live
in a former bank, all
stolid columns and masonry
around a vault made for bullion,
built as an anchor
and gated place that chaos
could not prevail against.
The walls would be fit to face
any weather, even the lobbing of a shower
of improbable mortars.
In quarters on an upper floor,
amid the warm air’s rising
I would preside
over a lobby of majesty
and marble tiles, and around it many rooms
to fill as I see fit,
even according to my whim.
One hears rumors of such a place.
At first, it seems, the desire stems from a fear of impending wars or weathers, but later in the poem, the speaker’s real motive, for power, is revealed. The final line is haunting, in its poignancy. “One hears rumors of such a place.” Are these the rumors that those who continue to support the capitalist regime are listening for? The promise of their own success, their own vaults, even though it is an empty promise, this is why so many are willing to buy tickets for this train, they genuinely believe they will have their own vaults when the ride finally stops. In “Debt” the speaker critiques the oft used metaphor of the wolf, reminding us that they are not deadly hunters, but prefer sleep and play. And in “Death by Sugar,” our demise comes from our desire for the sweet life, literally, our gluttonous habits taking us down.
Smith ups the ante later on, in “Cassandra.” We see “the saw teeth of data points belong to blades that level islands, slice through tusks and hives,” while we dine on our sins, the speaker and his friend sharing the weight of this knowledge. Knowledge that will quickly disappear if our current administration has anything to say about it, as they continue to strip language about climate change from official documents and websites. Luckily, unlike Cassandra, more and more are listening, are believing, but even a collective prophesizing may not be enough to turn the tide.
Cassandra is remembered more for being mad
than being right, says a friend
bowed under his burden of consciousness.
Sharing the load does not lighten it,
and we’ve yet to find a balm
for the chafing beneath its weight.
Nor are there enough drinks to dilute
the day’s high tide of graphs.
Though ragged, the saw teeth of data points
belong to blades that level islands,
slice through tusks and hives
along with the customary forests
and, snagging, bring up empty nets.
The menu is long, and served with questions.
Whose sins are we eating besides our own?
When might this banquet end?
Smith’s future is frightening, with “Squirrels of the Next Millenium” that are carnivorous and hunt in packs and may burst into flames. Who is to say how animals will evolve in the next chapter? Certainly, to survive us, some animals have evolved. Species that have learned to live with us seem to do best. And squirrels are already known to act as predators when prey is in greater abundance than other food sources. But this truth doesn’t matter, the truth of this poem is as likely as any other. And this has always been the job of poets, to imagine the unimaginable.
Ranging from Quebec to Madagascar, they display aquatic as
well as terrestrial behavior, with webbed feet seen in some local
populations. Formerly seen in several colors, only gray specimens
have been observed in recent decades. Around the winter solstice
in their respective hemispheres litters of two or three are born
naked, and some remain nearly so throughout the life cycle. With
an adult weight of 20 kilograms, they individually hunt animals
smaller than themselves and in temporary packs of three to seven bring down prey of up to 150 kilograms. Attacks on humans by non-rabid individuals are uncommon, but reported incidents have increased, especially in urban centers. Like all wild animals, they should not be approached or intimidated. Those with a newly sequenced genetic variation will, when cornered, burst into flames.
The poems in this collection not only pay their respects to the Chesapeake Bay Watershed, they also pay homage to a number of writers. Both in content and style, there are echos and influences of Jeffers, Gluck, Rueffle, as well as Williams, who makes his way into one of the later poems in the collection, “No Ideas But in Things”
While a wheelbarrow
glazed with rain water
turns to rust,
the hand of an atomic clock
is set closer to midnight.
Inland seas shrink
to fouled remnants, ringed
by memory, fouler silt,
and rotting fish that,
beneath the moon’s glow, shine,
swelling with single-celled life
that will no time soon evolve
to the consciousness of one
who notes them
and might, with will and work,
draw from scattered brilliance
constellations of great beasts,
and of heroes who could guide
our sailing in the present night.
The Place That is Coming to Us serves as both a warning and an invitation. An invitation to slow down and notice what we still have while we have it, an invitation to save what is worth saving, and a warning to reflect on what is not worth saving, what, instead, it might be time to let go of.
