Granularity, and: The Devil’s Pollard

80 ange mlinko GRANULARITY A sufficient diner; a fish tank in the middle of it to put the kiddies by, and distracting it was to notice a guppy methodically mouth up burp out as we ate single grains of blue gravel —The spruce holds its breath until its cyan needles scatter like a shattering of compasses at cascading Polaris. Weighted with orbs it’s realigning its spine; wound with strobes, it’s a brain + electrodes. Amidst the miracle, poetry went on scrutinizing itself. A yet and a but halted us; I said it was a chime, he called it a propinquity; over my shoulder I heard a voice say, “Well, it was legal but cumulatively it was bad business—” Christmas. Away in a managed a centrifuge bed twas decided one zygote had the stuff to get—granular, and I am more granular and more apparitional with every annular veer of the geese; there’s green in the leaflitter, one obese squirrel: winter’s abundance abundantly clear, getting clearer, even the snow is stackable CRSUM09 poetry.indd 80 5/22/2009 12:37:03 PM 81 ange mlinko THE DEVIL’S POLLARD Great angelic civic trees cropped into Ys and Vs to accommodate the powerlines appear now that their leaves are sheared as the wings (rather than horns) of a dilemma, a diptych. It’s the realpolitik of utilities—saying the powerlines must be accommodated and therefore either nonaction is out of the question or finding solutions to aesthetic injury is too costly (that the injury is more than aesthetic and may weaken the tree is thought a small but acceptable risk) and therefore we have come to the tip of one wing— we’ll argue no more: the other wing is the bard naming the devil’s pollard. CRSUM09 poetry.indd 81 5/22/2009 12:37:03 PM ...