Dear Tony Snow

quoting you below i think its a pertinent question to wonder just how far down you will go to
make this turn of events seem the fault of congress and not the criminal antics of your bossman and his gang -

you will certainly go down in history for this one, old boy

you make ron zeigler look smooth and decent.

clipped from www.commondreams.org “Now we have a situation where there is an attempt to do something that’s never been done in American history, which is to assail the concept of executive privilege which hails back to the administration of George Washington and in particular to use criminal contempt charges against the White House chief of staff and the White House legal counsel,” said White House Spokesman Tony Snow.

killing thistle

killing thistle

sunday afternoon the fifteenth of july
back home on this island
the sounds of small aircraft
and speedboats and
lawn machines including my own
electrically powered "weed whacker" -

(but i'm just trying to
keep the grass
back from the space we
think we need -
for the trash -
for the recycling -
to park the van -
get to the pump -
get to the compost -
around the back door of
the metal trailer built in 1956)

we dont have a garden -
but the compost at least
helps slow the speed
our big green trashbin
fills -
the trashbill
is long past
due -

we pick the berries
and the apples in the fall
and yesterday
laura made two arrangements
from flowers and grasses
and ferns
picked here and there -
in glass jars with
beach rocks and
sitting on the heater meant
to resemble a fire -
currently out of propane -

the electric bill is
paid, and when
it gets too cold we can heat the
house with the oven
and
the oil-filled radiator
that plugs into the wall
cost 40 bucks and
does a pretty nice job -
besides,
it's july
and right now the temperature
must be 85
degrees -

but i digress -
i want to think about
this meadow, again and
how today i cut back the tops
of some thistle to below its
lowest flower or bud.
i'd just learned that
such a cutting does
the plant in -
it must be annual - though i'm
no expert -
i'm barely a novice - and
the thistle that i
cut were few - they'd been
blocking my view of a pile
of old and dried
blackberry vines
heaped to burn at least
two years ago
and now a regular part
of this meadow -
and deep inside, i believe,
there are sparrows -
cant burn it now
so it stays -

now two ravens
call and remind me
why i came.
barnswallows feed their
fledgling babes
perched on the
pumphouse roof

and again, the ravens call and
the swallows return -
the thrushes song
spirals between the two and
and beyond -
a red tailed hawk - fifteen
minutes ago - brought in
a cool wind and
now both hawk and wind
are gone -

here's that wind
again.




24 july 17hr00

my friend fran
often says
to
encourage the growth of
what is wanted
rather than try
to
eradicate
what is not -

i think it is safe
to look at this tree,
a western red cedar,
tipped on its side
and still alive
and ask what is needed
to help it thrive.

wind knocked it over
no doubt –
and the himalayan
blackberries and asian
thistle surround it
in the center of a field
of blackberry and thistle
and grasses short and tall
with beer cans and tires
lurking beneath the summer green
and new construction promised -

this cleared field -
should i dig up the blackberry
and beat back the thistle?
or plant douglas fir and red alder

now
halfway along the trunk of the cedar
its thick down facing
branches - broken and
slowly rotting – by decades
lower the trunk
to the soil – and
branches are starting
to grow
toward the sky and yet
just as surely
the tree grows toward the earth

and here along the middle
beneath the horizontal trunk
a small cleared circle, unused
growing in, where people
used to come -
you squat to get in, and
there is the decaying remains
of the bench seat
of a truck,
stuffing dried or
missing -
as you might find
a carcass
of a squirrel that's been
hunted -
its springs all rusted -

the cedar must have
fallen in a blowing nor'easter
the crown points southwest -
at the base
the wood is dying -
but i wonder
that cedars don't
regenerate this way,
root from a branch,
like vine maple or
kreosote plants
in the desert –
branching from a root
that is more like
a branch -
true, what once was
the rootball
is covered in blackberry
but the upside sprouts
bright green.


18hr15

between my hair
and my spit and my
blood and my piss,
if i haven't
left a seed
in this field,
i have
left a sample.

19hr50

swallows above the meadow
between the porch and the water -
i cut more grass around
the trailer – raked
into big rolling bundles
so much grass – much of it taller
than i am – and gone to seed.
thistle thrives
in places disturbed
three pigeon guillemots
race north -
juvenile robins
hide and seek
in disguise -
and now i hear
a young loon cry.
how can i
uproot the berries
and not
the earth.

on the matter of artifacts, corpses, and rights

to a friend

on a part of the question
of how we might distinguish
between that which has
rights
and that which does not:

well, one thing is clear
any rock borrows nothing
to be -
which you simply cannot
say
of an artifact -
always built from somebody's bones -
nothing made from
what wasn't -
what is here –
what is made
is made with what is here -
the question of how we treat corpses
is the place in this world
where our traveling
thought and the
beat of the earth
coincide
what is here
was here. hear the
nuthatch's tin horn
and try to remember
the last hummingbird
you saw -
what is made
was made from the corpse of what is
here.
see the diatom dead
at the bottom
of the sea. the seas die.
i see across the water
i see the refinery at cherry
point.
ive seen kinglets and chickadees
and sparrows collude.
how often these tall flames
from the mainland –
we are the ghosts.
you are a ghost. you are.

point fermin, of a monday

this morning

on the rocky shore

beneath the shale and

sandstone cliff

forty pelican's unspooled

themselves from beyond

my sight and

banked to the left,

banked to the right

flying just above my

extended reach -

their perfect soaring,

coasting flight -

a cuneiform - a telegraph -

whatever it is

that they intend

i hold it in

my loosened grasp

and see it only when

i slit my eyes

and obliquely

let them glide.

and this from the BBC business page

clipped from news.bbc.co.uk

Iraqi oil wealth 'going untapped'

Iraq has known oil reserves of 116 billion barrels Iraq's oil reserves are significantly untapped and daily production could be doubled within five years, a report has concluded. Iraq is sitting on potential reserves of 100 billion barrels, nearly twice as much as currently estimated, according to a study by energy analysts IHS. If these reserves were exploited, it said, Iraq could overtake Saudi Arabia as the world's top oil producer. But a major improvement in security and investment was needed, it added.

april 4 1967 MLK Jr at the Riverside Church "Beyond Vietnam - to break a silence"

clipped from www.americanrhetoric.com These are the times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.

not like we didnt know this, now its official

clipped from blog.wired.com The Government Accountability Project, a whistleblower and watchdog group in DC, released a report (.pdf) today detailing a top-down government campaign to suppress climate change research that deviated from policy positions within the Bush administration. The GAP report, "Redacting the Science of Climate Change," took a year to assemble and relies on information from dozens of interviews and thousands of FOIA disclosures, internal documents and public records. It illustrates an organized and secretive White House effort beginning in 2001 to restrict scientists' ability to accurately communicate their research results to the media, the public and Congress. Using low-level proxies, the administration altered press releases, muzzled scientists who spoke openly and, frequently, routed requests for information about sensitive research to the White House. In the report, GAP focuses on NOAA but includes information on similar tampering at NASA and the EPA.