The Invaders

Some 1,285 plant species are currently designated as invasive in the United States.

—New York Botanical Garden Center for Conservation and Restoration Ecology

What price Shakespeare's starlings' murmuration,

let loose in Central Park by Eugen Schieffelin,

a man whose own forebears hailed from Baden-Württemberg.*

Beset by animal, vegetative, and human invaders

from alien venues planetwide,

there’s this small consolation:

despite the ubiquity of kudzu,

we're still the fastest gun in any zoo!

Uproot the bittersweet, pluck out periwinkle,

porcelain berry vine, and Japanese knotweed

(though that might physic you against Lyme).

And while you’re at it, have Bella put to sleep;

she kills our native birds—which makes one weep!

And Kelpie Buddy, too; he herds nonnative sheep!

* Schieffelin, an amateur ornithologist, supposedly wanted to introduce all the birds mentioned by Shakespeare in America. To that end, he released sixty British starlings in Central Park, New York, in 1890. "His attempts to introduce bullfinches, chaffinches, nightingales, and skylarks were not successful," Wikipedia says.

Saturday, July 5, 2025

Prayer for a Second-Guess Outcome

Hieronymus Bosch, De tuin der lusten / "The Lust Garden," oil on oak panels. Called The Garden of Earthly Delights. Museo del Prado, Madrid

In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire,

That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,

As the deathbed whereon it must expire,

Consumed with that which it was nourished by.

—Shakespeare, “That time of year thou mayst in me behold” (Sonnet 73)

  I pray to Heaven that I may be wrong,

—dumbest of pleas, it's hard to voice,

But thought allows no better choice,

Petitioning in darkening controversy,

Bad though the consequences may be,

If scant compared to what might well befall

Should it transpire I’m not wrong at all.

For if not wrong, I fear, I might be right.

  Daimonion, a second guess or sight

I ask not for myself, but for all redress—

Birds of the air, the dolphins in the sea—

That, in the upshot, life may yet shine bright.

I’ve always been a fool, so let me now, too, be,

The dumb self-petitioner of this sad address.

Friday, July 4, 2025

Amphisbaena, or, The Legend of the Seven Unjust Women

Amphisbaena in the Aberdeen Bestiary (ca. 1200)

The amphisbaena has a second head at its tail end, as if a single mouth did not suffice to spill its venom.

— Pliny the Elder, Natural History 8.85 (77–79 CE)

A legend old as Ur of the Chaldees

Informs us that thirty-six righteous men

Leaven bad humanity’s unfair dough,

But a tablet recently unearthed

Asserts that, completing this assignment,

Seven unjust women are in the know.

Justice demands its matching Other: Look!

They cried in Nippur, Lagash, and Uruk.

It's said those girls should number thirty-six

To equal the Lamed Vav Tzadikim

(Borges’ name for them’s “the Lamed Wufniks”),*

Or "righteous hidden men," in total tally,

But others insist that seven suffice

With facts recorded on far side of nice

To compensate for Earth’s injustice dearth,

Best of all possible this-worldly worth.

That role's by far the hardest to fulfill,

Too tough for ignorant unrighteous males,

Like you, like me. A Gloria Grahame

Near lookalike in Congress (R–Belial),

Sets out their iniquitous family style:

When Amphisbaena backs a specious bill,

Cute as a bug’s ear, holding, there, the floor,

Unfairness, admirably, never fails:

Unfair outcomes make taut those salty sails,

Justice spoils the rich cream in petit-bourgeois pails.

Think but of the risks that we once took.

And Father’s hackneyed unforgiving look.

It's fun to pair the sainted and the crook;

Justice and its Other, partners, what’s more,

Just as envisaged in Chaldean lore

And by the Harappans long before,

Sex up the sempiternal score.

*Jorge Luis Borges, Manual de zoologia fantástica / Book of Imaginary Beings (1957/1969).

Tuesday, July 1, 2025