The Red Letters
In ancient Rome, feast days were indicated on the calendar by red letters.
To my mind, all poetry and art serves as a reminder that every day we wake together beneath the sun is a red-letter day.
––Steven Ratiner
Red Letter Poem #274
Long Story Short
Tinkering with carbon and hydrogen
for half a million years, life taught itself
to make sugar from sunshine. Whence came
cells, then cities of them: sea sparkles
and slipper, wheel and trumpet animalcules
and eventually big us, tucked into skins
moist and just the right temperature to host
tribes of one- and multi-celled microbes.
Handy, we grew, hungry for more
than food—oil, iron, even sand. We mined
and built and fought. The ground shakes
with wars, and we've altered earth's skinny
atmosphere: the sky, invisibly broken, visibly
perturbed, drops bats, drops birds.
––Pamela Alexander
If, by chance, the colloquial flourish used as a title for today’s poem has fallen out of fashion among your acquaintances, here’s all you’ll need to know: when you find yourself being regaled by your visiting aunt or next-door neighbor with some convoluted narrative––and they punctuate their epic with the phrase long story short––prepare for disappointment. Any notion of brevity, or the hope for a pithy summation that will justify one’s patience––well, that ship’s sailed. This particular expression is one I very much associate with the rather tangled family stories I heard when I was growing up––tales of hardship, triumph, and general mishigas––and thus I was predisposed, with my first reading, to feel a kind of intimacy toward this verse. So what makes Pamela Alexander’s history of planet Earth––in a mere fourteen lines, no less––so utterly charming (and, at the same time, so subtly unsettling) is that we are left to concoct the bulk of this shaggy dog tale on our own, to tap into our less-than-authoritative resources to understand the implications of what she’s presented. After all, for a few billion years before Pamela’s first couplet, this planet’s atmosphere was an uninhabitable morass of methane and carbon dioxide. A quick billion years elapse, and now cyanobacteria have appeared, performing the astonishing little trick of “mak[ing] sugar from sunshine”––and, as another colloquialism might put it, we’re off to the races! But when those ‘cities of cells’ proliferate, the poet leaps––in a matter of a dozen words––to “big us,” and suddenly the playfulness of this tale has taken on a finer edge. “Handy, we grew, hungry for more/ than food—oil, iron, even sand.” I’m wondering whether you, too, felt a cold shiver down the spine when those alliterative H’s seemed to be encapsulating either humanity’s curriculum vitae or penning its epitaph.
How poignant and, at the same time, shameful to recognize the truth in those lines: “The ground shakes/ with wars, and we've altered earth's skinny// atmosphere: the sky, invisibly broken…”. And yet even the most obvious of warnings––birds dropping from the heavens, microplastics rife throughout the food supply, young children with lungs too compromised to play in our sullied atmosphere––seem not to be enough to free us from our inertia, to spur the political will to change course before it’s too late. And since almost all of the crucial details have been left to our imaginations, I found myself thinking of this poem as kind of a thumbnail entry in some galactic Wikipedia, written by an alien race who’d been charged with summing up the brief and brutal history of this blue-green planet after its inhabitants had doomed it to extinction.
Pamela is the author of four captivating poetry collections. Her publishing career began auspiciously when Navigable Waterways was awarded the Yale Younger Poets Prize, selected at the time by no less an eminence than James Merrill. Slow Fire (from Ausable/Copper Canyon Press) demonstrates how the power of a book of poetry can become even greater than the sum of its parts. The same applies to her recent chapbook, Left––winner of the Chad Walsh Chapbook Prize from the Beloit Poetry Journal. It’s a heartbreaking depiction of the breakdown of a marriage, and the disillusionment involved in discovering how imperfect is our understanding of even those we most dearly love. Today’s new offering seems to revolve around ideas of time and fragility. How the former accelerates dramatically from line to line, prehistory threatening to become a tragic posthistory across a few short breaths. And who would have imagined that the massive planet upon which we’ve made our homes could be almost as fragile as our dreams, as the hearts that craved endless new possibilities? With echoes in my head of a President still clamoring to ‘drill, baby, drill!’ while climate catastrophes abound, I found myself looking back to this poem’s sly title, realizing that the many billions of years it took to compose this story––Earth’s as well as our own––could be cut short in a heartbeat.
The Red Letters
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https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/community-of-voices
and the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene
http://dougholder.blogspot.com
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