Here I Throw Down My Heart

Diseases of the Earth

96 Diseases of the Earth for Gary Beck 1. At the end of the block they are building a high-rise, across the street another and another still until the street becomes an urban canyon, mountains of brick rising taller than the spindly trees clinging curbside. The rule of the day is excavate before the future comes in with no where to go but up, until we look around and see our own reflections slumbering under the seldom trees of old-growth forests, diseased and falling without a sound. Meanwhile they rebuild the cities from the ground up and call it vertical living. The rule tears up roads even as we travel on them, developers in a rush to call these peculiar towers: villages. Some afternoons I watch my neighbor walk her dog long enough to take my mind off the red wound of earth where one wall for a new school leans into the wind as if seeking a better route toward heaven. The playground is pocked where back hoes have plundered trees left roots exposed until the earth cries out in the old language of despair. Soon there will be a museum of trees 97 a thin line of scraggly aspens or elms surrounded by fencing, a sign reading: New Growth Do Not Cut Until… the number smudged by graffiti. Look: the neighbor’s dog has cocked its ear as if to catch every word. It sniffs the ground where daffodils and lilacs have been dug, it moves up and down the curb as if asking for complaints as if each time it marks the spot in urine a record has been taken and someone somewhere is making a case against all the diseases of the earth. We cannot move fast enough and we’ve gone too far to come back, immune systems failing like stars gone nova like fish begging for air. All around us construction sites bloom like bizarre plant life spread by cosmic dust. 2. Soon we will see nothing of the old land and its golden promise. Soon we will see only steel and plastic bordering what was once a lake pristine in morning air. Now we awaken to recorded sales talk telling us how wrong we have been not to buy the latest remedy ready to boost us to near immortal status. 98 What will become of us once our eyes are open? Where will the stars be if the city fills the sky? In Mali, the Dogon have charted the heavens for centuries Elders saying we were meant to travel the stars past the point where earth leaves us wanting more. There is little else to listen to in the desert except the song of sand and stars. Night falls suddenly like a lid clapped shut on a jar. There are no smudged lines no wire and steel to destroy the rim of earth falling away from us. The hands and knees we come stumbling in on are clumsy, human. The bags we carry under our ribs are poisoned in techno air. It was not meant to be like this— without gods, without the golden glare that should blind our coming. The Dogon saw the dog star more than a millennium ago from the cliffs of Bandiagara when Nommo pointed the way past distant planets. The dog star always listens they say and I imagine a shadow in the image 99 of the neighbor’s dog, ears erect listening to the cycle of stars. 3. We are meant for the calendars of Sirius, not here where the economy of corporations eats away the earth. We were meant to stand among the gods more fish-like than human. What will become of us if our eyes are not opened? We can’t find a way out. Each day we stand rooted to the same cycles, the same abuses—the weather that leaves us thinking we can turn back the clocks if we raise our arms in supplication. Just listen: that grinding sound you hear is the last tree falling as back hoes gouge down to rock for yet another high-rise. Every where you look there is a new way to lay claim to life we’ve never owned more rubbish added to the bin, the gutters, the road side attractions. At night I hear the neighbor’s dog barking into the silence of what was once a sky full of...