Breakfast of Champions – Reverie 2011 – Day 12

The glass of fresh-squeezed OJ, the bowl of steel-cut oatmeal littered with golden raisins and walnuts, the deep black coffee colored with cream.  And the books of war poetry: Brian Turner, Yusef Komunyakaa, Bruce Weigl.  Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam.  I look into my empty coffee cup and wonder about the cold sweet water, the betel-black smiles, Nixon’s Christmas bombing, the way the world turns for the soldier shot down amidst elephant grass and the man who was once a boy on the coast of Oregon, where a beached sperm whale died and was then removed by dynamite. 

I load the dishwasher with rinsed dishes and think about the boy who lost his father, who watches the news, who learns nothing from a world so far from all the fighting.  How no one in his school understands, except the girl whose mother has just been deployed for the third time.  I wash the soaking oatmeal pot and consider the complexity of war, the way anapest and aubade, caesura and synecdoche, image and irony fall into place, just as thousands of miles away, men and women fall to the ground, a final act, no breakfast to follow.

Nikky Finney – 2011 National Book Award Winner for Poetry – Head Off & Split

Last night Nikky Finney was awarded the 2011 National Book Award for her collection, Head Off & Split.  Inside the crisp white cover is the first of three sections: The Hard-Headed.  And this morning my fingers found their way through the first pages, past fish scales and seamstress pins and truth, to the poem, “Left.”  I read and felt as though I'd been punched in the stomach.  The kind of punch that brings you out of your chair to stand, still and breathless.  To pause and then to realize that you're still alive while they're not.  The three on that New Orleans rooftop.  Another three for the 1,836.  The kind of punch that leaves you winded and brought, once more, to your senses.

Pleas Help Pleas

Three words for the three stranded, the e already gone in the high waters. 

Nikky Finney’s power rises and slaps.  The shore I tumbled on as a child, strolled along as a young woman, the low levee of Lake Pontchartrain, has a different meaning.  All changed by the uncompromising cameras, the way the nearly two thousand were left to their own.  The poetry calls it up again, and the water lines are clear again.

Awarded the National Book Award for Poetry, for the book that gives voice to the many who have been silenced.  Strong stuff.  This poet has words in her pockets and her pockets are deep.  We are not done hearing from Nikky Finney.  It is a sure thing that she has plenty more to say and I for one am waiting for her next exclamation, her next whisper.

Her acceptance speech, a poem unto itself, a slew of incredible gratitude and veritas, is a hint of what is to come.  What a woman of words.  Again, I am reeling.  

Video of 2011 NBA acceptance speeches:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2011/11/national-book-awards-2011-video.html

"The Cap"

When asked by Prime Number's Prose Editor, Cliff Garstang, about the inspiration for my story "The Cap," I responded:

"Barry Hannah once said of a rich and reckless woman he’d like to have punished for running down his dog in her SUV, 'I set out to destroy that woman. But instead I’ve immortalized her.' I do believe I’ve done the same with a rich and reckless man." 

"Mr. H is working on lost time, ill-conceived time, time that waits for no one. He hasn’t ever had this problem before and is unsure of how to handle it. It is a definite conundrum. Mr. H loathes conundrums and says so to himself. Out loud. “I loathe conundrums.” Still, all the clocks in the house keep ticking."

- from "The Cap" by Karin C. Davidson - Prime Decimals 13.2 - Flash Fiction 

To read more, visit: 

http://www.primenumbermagazine.com/Issue13_PrimeDecimals2.html#anchor_405

A Different Sort of Beach

Destin, Florida - September 2010

The sand is still sugar fine, just like it was in the 60's, the 70's, even the 80's.  Even last year.  But now there is something new.  A coating of green that buckles and kicks up under your bare feet like sheafs of wallpaper.  And further down past the navy chairs, there's a layer of seaweed.  No, not seaweed.  This is seagrass that once lived on the bottom of the Gulf.  A member of the brown algae family, the grass now lies in great sodden blankets, thick layers of olive- and coffee-colored cloth, that no beach-goer wants to touch.  I imagine lying in bed with this blanket up to my chin, but the stench of something rotting, a pond in trouble, reminds me that this is nothing usual, nothing comforting.

If this grass now lies in folds at the edge of the water, then what is at the bottom of the Gulf where the grass once grew?  Go ahead, guess.  Dispersants, oil, a little supper of BP crude for all you fishes.  Sometimes the little fishes float up to the surface and end up on the beach amongst the soft dead grasses.  Algae as funereal bed.  

Swimmers wade through the algae and into the waves that are laden with more algae, fresh from the deep.  If one swims out far enough, the water is clear, a luscious turquoise.  Paddle surfers, ocean kayakers, infrequent pods of dolphin do better out there than swimmers.  Still, some are determined to get past the brown-green detritus.  Heads bob, laughter floats to shore, and soon they head in, once again through the algae, and on the beach the sunbathers eye them, perhaps expecting the brave ones to emerge covered in slime, sporting gills, like so many modern-day sea monsters.

Louisiana and the Gulf Coast

When the Deepwater Horizon oil rig went up in flames, a friend in New Orleans wrote that you could smell the fire all the way in the city, describing it as the sweet, acrid smell of burning crayons.  And then he added a few words, which called up the five years spent in recovering from Katrina: “Here we go again."

The Gulf Coast is plain tired of recovering.  Would it be out of the ordinary if the region could thrive and enrich the nation with seafood, commerce, energy sources, music, and culture that no other city in the United States can match?  Without all the disaster drama?  Well, darlin, life just ain’t that simple.

1999 BP advertisement

According to some of our Gulf coast representatives, the BP oil spill is a “statistical anomaly,” whereby the deepwater drilling moratorium is unfounded.  Really?  British Petroleum has such a good record?  Well, let’s see: the 2005 BP oil refinery explosion in Texas City, TX, which killed 15 workers and injured 170; the 2006 BP pipeline leak in Prudhoe Bay, AK; several more spills in Alaska; and add to all this charges of manipulating propane prices.  Yeah, sure they’re clean: as clean as the waters their pipes in the Gulf of Mexico are spewing crude oil at – what is it now, 100,000 gallons a day?  According to the radio program, Democracy Now, it is now apparent that the “BP Oil Spill  Confirmed as Worst in US History.”  So much for that anomaly idea.

And then there’s the fact of the many oil rigs that continue to operate in the Gulf of Mexico, despite the moratorium, and the 49 offshore drilling plans approved without complete environmental assessments.  Hold on though: it’s even more complicated than that.  On the Gulf coast the fishing and oil industries have worked side by side for decades, each providing a wide base of support for the economies of Texas and Louisiana.  So when the companies running a rig don’t have a backup plan for emergencies – yes, like this one – everyone gets hurt.  That workers die is unforgiveable.  That the coast, along with its fragile wetlands and wildlife, is mired in an ongoing deluge of oil is unbelievable.  That the billions of dollars BP has accumulated over the decades were never invested in research on “how to cap a leak immediately if one should occur” is unthinkable.

Louisiana shouldn’t have to feel forgotten, a lost cause, “Lose-iana.”  The depth of culture in New Orleans and the delta lands is immeasurable.  And by culture I mean, the people, all of them: musicians, culinary chefs, Krewes, waitresses and waiters, writers, fishermen and fisherwomen, oyster shuckers, artists, mechanics, Saints, preachers, singers, deck hands, therapists and teachers.  From all this humanity, surely new ideas will grow from old ones, and oil will sink back below the surface and new sources of energy will grow.  It’s the Gulf, after all, where the sun shines and the wind does indeed bend marsh grasses against its shores.