Lines: Chapman & Fulkerson
Robin Chapman / Clint Fulkerson
Banff Centre
Dec. 25
Dear Ones—dinner of sweet potato fries
and Black Angus burgers with bloodied boxers
on TV, the puppeteer journaling her family
under the flickering fight. Circus instructors
plan their work on silks and ropes and hoops
and the 30 foot swing of the giant trapeze.
The far-flung world whispers to faces buried
in their screens. The new Creativity Center rises
sheathed in steel and glass. In my studio,
the dark outside retreats before the sluice
of podcast radio, science news, gigabytes
of music I transfer from my memory stick.
Attention is our scarcest resource—mine,
to find the mountains rising all round us,
the stars flickering beyond the drizzle of snow,
the earth in its journey turning us again
toward light, the text of good will arriving,
the red silk fluttering with its human freight.
Dreams of the Science Writers’ Workshop
i.
I go naked to the Senior Center
to pick up our speaker, much
to the disapproval of the matron
and the surprise of the reporters
gathered to hear yet another
political candidate. We barely escape.
ii.
What do I want to shout?
Look at the plans of our scientists
half a century ago to bomb
in hundred-Hiroshima units
anyone we were afraid of!
Look at our powers to make
the poisons that could kill
all life, the viruses that the birds
could spread, the gene editing
and drives that could change
the lives of species in ways we know
nothing about! Look at our inventions
pouring into soil, and water,
and lives; it is not enough
to be a scientist, handmaid
or handyman to the state,
not enough to blow things up
or knock them out.
iii.
The headlines now fear robots
with machine intelligence.
Leonardo da Vinci: it was not enough
to make plans to improve the machines
on the rock shelf of civilization
to hurl stones and pour oil;
not enough to paint Mona Lisa
and walk beautifully about.
iv.
How be a peacemaker,
a baker, an obstetrician,
a dancer, a weaver, a musician,
a gardener, a lover of life?
v.
Cortés
ordered the burning
of Montezuma’s aviaries.
The US rained down
Agent Orange for years
on the forests
of Vietnam. And now
our peaceful driving about
and heating our houses
and burning our trash
threatens to strip
the aviaries of all the world.
vi.
Mummified, we stand around the table
each in our open coffin shouting out
our own particular version of truth
for our allotted hour or number of words.
Amplified, true; but hard, in my dream,
to walk-about, and the reporters
have closed their notebooks.
Jan. 6,
Banff
Dear Ones—the avalanche cannons
are going off on chinook-slicked slopes.
Listening to their distant booms I try
to imagine the sounds close up, loud
enough to trigger the tree-felling rush
of snow and ice down mountain sides—
the way those New Year’s cannon fireworks
must have sounded to the blackbirds
in their roost—I wonder who set them off,
and whether they meant for five thousand
birds, in blind panic, to collide and die,
falling dead from the sky—no one
in that small Arkansas town is telling who
or why, though all must know by now
whether it was a kid’s tragic prank
or some hired exterminator’s culling.
00
Robin Chapman is author of nine books of poetry, most recently One Hundred White Pelicans (Tebot Bach, 2013). She is recipient of Appalachia‘s 2010 Helen Howe Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared recently in Alaska Quarterly Review, Flyway, and Valparaiso Poetry Review.
Clint Fulkerson lives in Portland, Maine with his wife and daughter. He has exhibited his work in Maine at venues such as at Corey Daniels Gallery, Space Gallery, the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, the University of Maine at Farmington, and the Portland Museum of Art. He is represented in NYC by the Curator Gallery. His recent commissions include a mural at the Facebook Inc. NYC office, two murals at Maine Maritime Academy and a sculpture at USM Gorham under Maine’s Percent for Art program.
Clint’s work will be exhibited at the Unity College Center for Performing Arts in November/December 2016.