Down Here You’re With the Possible
One more twitch
of a forked twig
fathom-testing the blind inner life.
No time now for truth or dare
covering mirrors
so we can’t see spirits of the dead.
We need the real thing
a clear
view from on high
where we can stand above the loch
catch the flicker of a burn
reflecting emerald sky-foam
from Aurora Borealis
failing muscles of the Gulf Stream
and the two-hundred-and-fifty-
million-year core
of the Chacaltaya Glacier
once the highest ski resort on earth
now shingle
and a fossil-feather memory
of ice.
This week’s poem is from a chapbook of intense yet rangy ecopoems, Watershed by Ruth Padel. Connecting the lively and varied angles of reflection on the subject of water, realism is the primary value, but it’s expressed without being wrung of its own magical dimension. The work has the characteristic balance of literary artistry, casual grace and scientific knowledge that distinguishes Padel’s work. That the term watershed itself denotes a physical phenomenon as well as being a popular colloquialism for a crucial moment is indicative.
Down Here You’re With the Possible begins with the impossible. The ancient tradition of dowsing (water-divination) by means of a forked hazel twig has been discredited via the concept of unstable equilibrium: see this explanation from West Texas A&M University. I have to admit that, until now, I’d kept an open mind on the subject. Dowsing, in the argument of the poem, encompasses some broader concept of divination, implied by the “fathom-testing of the blind inner life”. The poet’s “one more twitch” is a little like a parent’s, telling a child “one more sweet”, ie only one more. But it acknowledges that intuition is not easily sacrificed, and might still have a place, though not as a tool of climate science.
The second verse expresses the urgency of discarding games (“truth or dare”) and superstition. The “clear view” is found “on high” – by cerebral bandwidth and foresight. But there’s a literal ascent, too, allowing physical actuality and imagination to coalesce. Above the loch, we “catch the flicker of a burn / reflecting emerald sky-foam // from Aurora Borealis”. A burn is a small stream, but the Scottish word also reminds us of a planet on fire. The miniature reflection of the “emerald sky-foam” is magically realised, but, if we venture outside the poem, science warns us that the precipitation that produces the beautiful aurorae may also deplete Earth’s ozone layer.
From this verse on, environmental damage accumulates. Padel sums up the sad, complicated story of the collapse of the Gulf Stream’s system of warm ocean-currents in the anthropomorphism of “failing muscles”. The image gives animal form and activity to the water, and suggests how all animals, ourselves included, will suffer, and are suffering, as the ice caps melt and the sea levels rise. The next “slide” in the visual presentation sweeps us into the core of the Chacaltaya glacier. Bolivia’s only ski resort has already been destroyed: that big number which gives its age (“two-hundred-and-fifty- // million-year core”) is tidily contrasted in the mimetic final stanza, tracing the glacier’s final shrinkage to an area “now shingle / and a fossil-feather-memory / of ice.” Again, the image of a living creature, one that could fly and, at least metaphorically, leave a “fossil-feather memory” in the landscape which humans used and destroyed, adds an intimate dimension to vast geological process.
The whole poem is designed as a unity, the syntax and verses flowing into one another like the interrelated ecologies they reflect. While it’s a didactic poem, with a central commitment to the variously “hard” environmental sciences, Down Here You’re With the Possible is also “down here” with the human need for poetry. It sustains our visual pleasure; it has the verbal music and texture that irresistibly appeal to “the blind inner life”.
Importantly, many of the Watershed poems engage with the human psychology that’s so frequently, and so foolishly, ignored at the present tumultuous “watershed” moment. Padel uncovers the mirror, reveals the universality of climate denial. She allows us a small smile towards our inner Mrs Noah, who tries operatically to resist boarding the Ark, and has to be “dragged up the gangplank / waving a goblet / shouting I will stay with my gossips.” (Rehearsing Noye’s Fludde). On the other hand, there’s the “blast / of climate terror,” the sudden, equally incapacitating sensation “as if a pub in that crystal cave at the end of the world / held a darts match for the blind / and the boards were our bodies … our hearts.” (Lady of the Lake). Few of the poems are as painful as that image, but they all dramatise the loss we face.
I finished the collection recalling a comment by Penny Condry, the widow of the great naturalist writer, conservationist and ornithologist William Condry. In a conversation once, after a poetry reading, she remarked: “Bill and I had a phrase we liked – the beauty of facts.” It wasn’t intended as poetry criticism: the context was that of a friend’s research project, but it impressed me because it related to the skills I hold in highest regard – the making of poetry, the writing of prose and the teaching of any worthwhile subject. Watershed is a reminder that to be taught, as a reader, by a writer who can communicate both the beauty and the facts is a joyous privilege … but also that, when the lesson is environmental, it has to lead to action.
