A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes Read online

  Copyright © 2015 by Madhur Anand

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication data available upon request

  ISBN: 978-0-7710-0698-2

  ebook ISBN: 978-0-7710-0699-9

  Published simultaneously in the United States of America by McClelland & Stewart, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, a Penguin Random House Company.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014920840

  McClelland & Stewart,

  a division of Random House of Canada Limited,

  a Penguin Random House Company

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  v3.1

  for my parents

  Is it in the sun that truth begins?

  ADRIENNE RICH

  Everything existing in the universe is the fruit of chance and necessity.

  DEMOCRITUS

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Disclaimer

  I. WHAT WE DON’T SEE IN LIGHT’S DARK REACTIONS

  What We Don’t See in Light’s Dark Reactions

  Cantharellus

  Especially in a Time

  Cosmos bipinnatus

  Betula papyrifera

  The Simplest Significant Virus

  Vaccinium angustifolium

  Pink Cyclamen, The Economist, Beijing Airport

  Hill Country, Old Mercedes, and Parturition

  The Chipping and the Tree

  Three Laws of Economics

  Suede

  We’re Not Worried

  Sole and Plaice (On the Mathematics of Flatfish)

  Various Authors Have Described

  A Proposal on Cedar Street

  Black-Capped

  Wetland

  Resilience Experiment (It Is Becoming More Apparent)

  Grounds for Sculpture

  If I Can Make It There

  Botanic

  II. NORMALITY ASSUMPTION

  Normality Assumption

  Somewhere, a Lake

  Table for One

  Sarah Said It Would Be Fun

  Two Jars

  The Gallery

  Held in a Fist

  Global Gap Structure

  Parle-G

  RuBisCO

  Twenty-Two Weeks

  Will It?

  Untitled

  Rhizome Logic

  Two Glasses

  Bell Curve

  Forward–Backward Procedure

  Fifty–Fifty

  Pine Plantation (An Expansion)

  Circo Massimo

  Proceed to Genetic Testing

  Who? Which?

  The New Index

  Evan Said

  The Sweet Smell

  III. NO TWO THINGS CAN BE MORE EQUAL

  No Two Things Can Be More Equal

  Alienation (The Transferring of Title or of Interest)

  Moving On

  Type One Error

  The Origin of Orange

  Cellulose and Pigment

  Tulipa ‘Apeldoorn’s Elite’ (Darwin Hybrid)

  Iris germanica

  Papaver rhoeas

  Garam Masala

  Derivation

  Otros Pájaros

  Artichauts Farcis

  The World Is Charged

  IV. THE STRATEGY OF THE MAJORITY

  The Strategy of the Majority

  What to Wear

  Fragmentation

  Brassica juncea

  Three Laws of Physics

  Nature Is Never Spent

  Successional Correspondence

  Nature Morte with Zoology Professor

  Emerging, Infectious

  Grey Is Its Own Complement

  Picasso’s Goat

  Valedictions Forbidding Mourning

  Conditional B

  Power Outage

  Thoughts at Crawford Lake on a Sunday Afternoon While Trying to Conceive (The Varve Is a Rhythmite)

  Hex Codes

  Mean Field

  This Is the Ring of Six

  Empty Calories

  Too Exhaustive to Survey Here

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  This title contains long lines of poetry. The line of characters below indicates approximately the longest line in the text:

  -eyed, black-backed, yellow-footed, brown-hooded, glaucous-winged,

  To most accurately reproduce the layout of the text on the printed page, you may choose to decrease the size of the text on your viewer and/or change the orientation of your screen until the above line of characters fits on a single line. This may not be possible on all e-reading devices. Viewing this title at a higher than optimal text size or on a screen too small to accommodate the longest lines in the text will alter the reading experience and may cause single lines of some poems to display as multiple lines of text. If this occurs, the turn of the line will be marked with a shallow indent.

  What We Don’t See in Light’s Dark Reactions

  WHAT WE DON’T SEE IN LIGHT’S DARK REACTIONS

  The rejection of reds, a gap of blues, chlorophyll

  absorbing necessary wavelengths. The public good

  of peacocks, feather primordia morphogenesis

  behind the wheel. Function and shine of an evening

  brooch, butterflied. Shiver and heat: sky-scraping violet,

  Brazilian soccer shirts, and cachaça on ice. Bird

  of paradise peering through closed canopy. Flowers,

  like Heliconia, mistaken for flight. Fancy.

  Economy. Monkeys and mycorrhizae playing

  non-zero-sum games. Giant seed pods like maracas,

  chandeliers dimmed, everything instrumental, quiet

  breaths exchanged by the carbon pool. Oranges, crushed, too

  easily spent. Green going underground. Tropical

  bonds, shape-shifting mouths – nameless and innumerable –

  moving iron-rich soil, liberating minerals

  and death. Liana hanging. Black-green-red, a parting

  of leaves. Something winged, ringed molecules, sugar from light.

  CANTHARELLUS

  We were boring jack pines, storing their cores in plastic

  drinking straws. It had been raining. I’m no naturalist

  but understand the association of fungi

  and forests, their partiality for recent rain.

  I don’t know birds or bark, but once grasped indifference

  by the neck. Such that when I saw them – creamy orange

  against first brown, then grey, then green – I was 95

  per cent sure. I brushed aside soil, lichen, moss, placed them

  into yellow hard hats. Later we would discern which

  tree rings were false. Of greater concern was my own

  mortality. And mushrooms I decided were true.

  ESPECIALLY IN A TIME

  Wild populations recognize that the linearity,

  the relative rareness, the major museums, or any area

  which is known, is a surrogate

  for proximity

  Stream beetles, Galapagos finches, and Israeli

  passerine birds are transformed

  into an index of limited
br />   available information

  Elytral lengths, slope of the regression,

  and mid-latitude precipitation

  unravel the anomalies

  A prolonged change is also under scrutiny

  J. Babin-Fenske, M. Anand, and Y. Alarie, “Rapid Morphological Change in Stream Beetle Museum Specimens Correlates with Climate Change,” Ecological Entomology 33, no. 5 (2008): 646–51.

  COSMOS BIPINNATUS

  Imminent is always less than desirable. Ice

  white, boldly bordered, splashed or stippled. We’ve been letting

  the ivy go for how long? Nostalgia for the turn

  of a century, nest at the top of a TV

  antenna tower, which could be integral, could be

  squirrels. Four parts water to one part sugar feeds the

  hum. Now we curtain, now we dream of iron blackbirds.

  Place seeds like black clipped fingernails from last year’s packet

  of Cosmos ‘Candy Stripe’ in egg cartons reclaimed from

  the blue box. A dozen divided by four, six, twelve.

  Occasionally a pure crimson bloom may appear.

  BETULA PAPYRIFERA

  Something native, sequenced, compiled, dying to be recalled.

  White encoded with black dots and vascular dashes

  from the rented cottage on Ahmic Lake to plastic

  bags in our hatchback. I stole a branch the length of two

  phone books. Gorgeous and genuine against the living

  room pine shelves, its bark hospitable to pale crustose

  lichen and first-century Buddhists writing down how

  to survive: await the ringtones of light and moisture,

  length inversely proportional to the frequency

  of occurrence, on–off clicks directly understood.

  THE SIMPLEST SIGNIFICANT VIRUS

  That wishbone you pulled from my pharynx when I was three.

  I type polio to a world that barely contains

  you. I discover the soccer ball symmetry of

  the particle, its short and simple genome. Then I

  type in your common name. Find a photo of handsome

  you: “In dark suit sitting at desk. Copyright status

  unknown.” It’s true our family name means joy and I’ve spread

  it, an invasion populating the middle names

  and Saturday morning fields of my own two children.

  There’s no escaping it. That, and the resemblance of

  my temper, the bridge of my nose, to yours. Sometimes I

  think the “sweet-like-honey joy” that is my full name, my

  trophy-laden life, will sum up to the atrophied

  muscle of your little boy leg, but it won’t equate.

  VACCINIUM ANGUSTIFOLIUM

  Lowbush law or just light’s kindness, slightly acidic

  hills exhale to fruition tiny crowned spheres. Thin red

  liquid is clear but wrong. Their berries are alas false

  accessory fruit, flesh from the surface of petals.

  What’s beneath becomes second nature. Geometry

  of rhizomes, dirt, gossip, antioxidants, memory.

  Come July, ripe museum hours, the dead-on pigments,

  Rayleigh scattering. When every non-fiction begins

  to factor in the predictive power of petals.

  Pale white lampshades, designed to keep all the good light in.

  PINK CYCLAMEN, THE ECONOMIST, BEIJING AIRPORT

  My attention is drawn to the vulva understory

  of a palm in a plastic planter. Upswept petals

  rooted in black, aerated by Styrofoam-white balls.

  In the Mediterranean, tubers lie dormant

  every summer and seeds only germinate in

  limestone crevices. I flip lip glosses, wristwatches,

  awaiting flight. Time is a latent variable.

  To become endangered by scanty dispersal skills

  or eye candy blessed by Adam Smith’s invisible hand.

  Everywhere markets scream in sans serif. I carry on.

  HILL COUNTRY, OLD MERCEDES, AND PARTURITION

  There’s a new index for predicting catastrophes.

  It’s the decreasing rate of recovery from small

  perturbations. The critical slowing down before

  a tipping point. Like taking a picture when I leave

  out the wire fence and then move in for a close-up

  of the Brangus cow standing right behind it. I’m taught

  she’s been bred for her disease resistance, tolerance

  to heat, and outstanding maternal instincts. I look

  for the three-eighths Brahman, traces of shared ancestry.

  It’s autumn. I’ve flown to Texas to meet my future

  father-in-law. The vistas are simple and golden.

  But then this brown cow appears, stands too still, becomes time,

  consuming. That’s when I see signs: she’s just given birth.

  THE CHIPPING AND THE TREE

  Spizella passerina, Spizella arborea

  Songbirds of Peterson’s guide defy fragility.

  They live on top shelves with defined range maps, Latin names.

  They are ideal, forever in caps, black or rufous

  eyeliner. They don’t fall apart by lost interest,

  pollen, burnt meteorites, saltation of cornfields.

  In the Bible, two turtledoves can be sacrificed

  to enter the house of God, two sparrows are sold for

  a penny, and the black hairs on my head are numbered.

  I’m trying to comprehend economy. The law

  of diminishing returns dictates it’s worth knowing.

  Chipping sparrow’s haplotype depth is more akin to

  red-winged blackbird’s than to song sparrow’s. Passer is of

  Least Concern. The backyard sparrows share ancestors with

  Tyrannosaurus, but the American Tree is

  phylogenetically distant, visits in winter.

  The low-pitched call of two glass doves the dimensions of

  bee hummingbirds claim I’m a thief. That I stole them from

  Mrs. Williamson’s living room when I was eight,

  had been taught long division and should have known better.

  I knew and didn’t. The simplest flight call being: seen?

  The truth? I saw them, touched them, enclosed them in my hand.

  THREE LAWS OF ECONOMICS

  There’s a dead space between mouth and lung. It’s the volume

  of inhaled air that does not take part in gas exchange.

  Benefits can accrue. For example, inflation.

  I hate balloons, the tentative permanence of air,

  the conceit (I’m made from a tree!), the shock when they burst.

  Fractal tears. Random shreds. Hurried externality.

  The shots began today. Birch and ragweed in one arm.

  Cat and dog in the other. In a few years you might

  attain immunity. Chances of success compound.

  SUEDE

  But if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored?

  – Matthew 5:13

  At the age of thirteen I took my First Communion and slipped

  the round white wafer into my back pocket. I was used to being

  handed raisins and almonds at a temple where the only English

  was “the truth always prevails.”

  My best friend witnessed it,

  said nothing, had tested my faith many times down by the ravine

  where some teen had gone missing that summer as if she

  had lost her host. As if it were an honest mistake. I was innocent

  but not without sin. I hid my voice. I did not ask good questions.

  I hid my light. The thing itself felt like Styrofoam, inconclusive

  as an unused condom, but with even less intention.

  I threw it out

  in the upstairs bathroo
m, the one with the powder-blue double sink.

  I buried it under toilet paper rolls, a crushed Dove box, used

  maxi-pads my mother would, without a word, make disappear.

  I am vain and guilty of overcompensation. I once saw quilted

  wheat fields in Saskatchewan spring and shouted: My God, fuck me.

  Even now strangers may watch me watching myself in my new

  honey-suede boots. In someone’s eyes I was too young, it could

  have been porn. But I am thankful, for my voice has gotten sweeter

  with age. I know what it means, dear God, to melt on my tongue.

  WE’RE NOT WORRIED

  Danish astronomers have just discovered sugar

  – simple molecules of glycolaldehyde – floating

  in the gas around a young, sun-like star, four hundred

  light years away. The molecules are falling

  toward

  a binary star, a system of two bodies,

  one

  primary, one companion, orbiting about

  a common centre of mass. This space sugar, they think,

  helps replicate DNA. We too orbit. Tonight

  it’s ice cream at The Boathouse Tea Room, noticing where

  the Speed River’s melting and, more urgently, the sides

  of cones. We choose chocolate and vanilla, measure

  the deviations. An old lady is feeding geese.

  Astronauts wanted neapolitan for their trips

  to the moon. Freeze-dried prototypes proved impractical.

  Crumbs were dangerous to microgravity, like bird

  parts in plane engines. Now they sell it at the NASA

  gift shop, so we can all travel to outer space too.