Parasitic Oscillations Read online

  lab assignments. Down by the counterfeit Thames, behind

  a fence, I looked for repeated behaviour, something

  to count on. For instance, how often one leg was raised.

  I made four little strokes. I bundled them together.

  The first hand was accurate, the second introduced

  errors. A certain number of feathers were ruffled.

  I filled my sheets with means so suggestive they led me

  to graduate school. I met a girl in the process

  of enumerating the aggression of cichlids

  and yet another who watched bees pollinate paper

  flowers. One girl stood and watched the Southern blot until

  the sun rose. And then I saw there were girls everywhere.

  And we danced in the aquaria and we danced in

  the terraria and when the weather was correct,

  we walked, in sequence, the entire length of the path

  between the realistic river and grass-patched park.

  SURFACE TEMPERATURES OF ALBATROSS EGGS AND NESTS

  Sadie Ryan’s making sick maps to highlight hotspots

  of malaria, where it’s gonna hurt most, nations

  in red and redder. She’s contouring range shifts, standard

  deviations, death: purple, pixelated, planet

  math hidden in black boxes, black bodies absorbing

  all incidences. Sadie’s all concerned about Lyme

  disease, manels, fragmented landscapes, about the egg

  temperatures, which are poorly studied across all

  species. She tells us incubation is a thermal

  mutualism, that most fieldwork takes place during

  overcast days on The Bird Island, where no landings

  are allowed, where the black-browed, grey-headed,

  and lesser-known wandering pairs are accounted for,

  where south Atlantic waves off Main Island oscillate

  bringing future data. “There is an urge to be good.

  To be seen to be good. To be seen,” said Zadie Smith.

  FIELD COURSE

  Can’t jog two circumferences of Exhibition Park

  without heading straight for endangerment. Behind chain-

  link diamonds, dozens of balls flood the court for a lesson.

  Playability comes from internal pressure, pull

  of a church key breaks the hermetic seal. Remove two

  atmospheres, everything loses bounce. Not green, optic

  yellow, for distance. Made from a form of rubber not

  easily broken down. What is felt? What delays flow

  separation in the boundary layer. I’ve never

  thought of Wimbledon as a habitat, let alone

  provision of habitat. Cut out circles in spheres

  become waterproof homes for recovering harvest

  mice. The mouse always finds the shortest path of return.

  The long run projects just this: sweaty brow, matted blade.

  VISITING THE ROTHSCHILD COLLECTION, TRING

  We leave the inn at Aylesbury, outskirts of the Bucks

  to get some air, concrete, hedgerow, cornfield. A yellow

  arrow divides the public from the private. Don’t step

  on the cracks. A kissing gate’s hinge geometry keeps

  out ruminant A, allows in ruminant B with

  its artificial intelligence, its shiny ear,

  mouth, silk, tassel, gene, deep learning, embossed hierarchy.

  Don’t touch the crops. My three children run ahead, the lag

  between us becomes the cassowary, the dodo.

  They can’t see the eggshells at their feet. Please forgive me

  that I want my life. To be that grotesque museum

  with one of everything. To navigate this world

  when simulation outpaces understanding. To

  request the local fare and be told they’re out of ducks.

  SUMMATIONS

  He draws a crooked line connecting dime sailboats to

  quartered caribou. He erases it. The new line

  is straighter, thicker, blacker. It is how he becomes

  a crow, how he is learning to fly. He must first perch,

  make obtuse angles with his feet. He must imprint, must

  carry over double digits with what remains of

  ambition, his American father. Then he may

  attempt the word problems, other world problems, the small

  matter of Benji’s length of rope, Cindy’s ten apples,

  until all the units match, until he finds fewer apples,

  more or less rope. Until he has solved for fibre, for

  the orchard. His teacher says, “Learning how to make change

  is one of the hardest things we will tackle this year.”

  He brings his summations, his correctable errors.

  But ambition is a bitch, is A.O. Hume’s notes on life

  histories of seven hundred bird species that in

  1883 at Rothney Castle in Simla

  were stolen by his servant and sold as waste paper.

  ALL MY LEARNING IS FALLING THROUGH THE CRACKS

  Welcome to the Editorial Manager. Please

  log in. Please select as many classifications

  as you feel covers your interests. But I was on

  the way to Marsville, to a rotated red bird’s eye

  on an electronic map. Through the window I saw

  a farm where reproduction rose, a black jagged line

  toward the ordinate. Toward day butter futures.

  Cash-settled butter. Electronic wheat calendar

  swap. Composite hard red winter wheat. Live cattle side

  by side. Non-fat dry milk. International soybean.

  I threw an apple core into the stock exchange, the

  native material of the land, the dirt below.

  American Naturalist said go to Century

  Wood Products, where roads devolve from concrete to gravel

  at Thirteenth Line. He said American elm survived

  the first apocalypse. So much left we could sample

  from stained or unstained shades. So much barn we could rejoice

  at the sight of American crows perched on a pole,

  a once northeastern tree, afield, anonymous, cold.

  And praise the industrial cows, the industrial

  grain, and the decrepit barns made of endangered elm.

  Fourteen hundred dollars’ worth I ordered, and he said

  “No worries” and added the goods and services tax,

  his signature economical as a live-edge.

  Browning. No complete death. The same letter expressed in

  the gut. In triplicate. From the Himalayas to North

  American towns, unfortunately a lifestyle:

  a four-year-old daughter, double-sided razor blades

  coated with gold, a mortar and pestle, sexual

  incompatibility, red/black/green colour scheme,

  volcano plots, their endemic bodies, the sealing

  wax that opens a door, a strategy in the field,

  an elm library constructed from pandemic elm.

  Dwell time: Oakville, Mississauga, more false positives.

  Subtractive, upregulated, inoculated.

  Aggressive and non-aggressive, three fungal species.

  Collectively referred to here as New Harmony.

  Marked with an asterisk means noteworthy and forests.

  SATYAGRAHA IN TÜBINGEN

  I have seen it before, felt its upright tips across

  my palms. Some marsh. Some protected coastline. Ein bischen

  bitte of the greenery behind the fishmonger’s

  glass. I watched the moments caught—yesterday, he insisted—

  separated from th
eir heads, from their tails, from their scales,

  from every certainty, and he spoke so fairly

  of taste, omelettes. I did not hide my light: Sie haben

  forgessen…das Grün. He has not charged me. He waves one

  hand above his head. Something evaporates there.

  My little mouth, full of sea, my little head, full of

  mud. Alone and red-handed in a rented room at

  noon, finding correct names—sea samphire, sea pickle, sea

  asparagus—worse than corrupt ones: Saint-Pierre, patron

  saint of fishermen. The succulent stem was a straight

  tablespoon of salt. At the middle of my life I

  want that. Directness. More than what my cells make from tides.

  Look! I shout out the window. I’m hidden in plain sight!

  Someone else is thirsty. One granule crystallizes.

  Past the coconut stand at Dandi beach a tourist

  finds a clay pot floating in the surf. He removes black

  sludge from inside and packs it among his belongings.

  From the airplane the Arabian Sea looks like death.

  The clay pot was in fact an urn. He discovers this

  in dreams, in his bed with dirt under his fingernails.

  The urn, the names, the marsh, the charge, the cells, and Gandhi

  march on. Shall it be restored? My mother will die soon.

  Last time she fell they spent weeks adding salt to her blood.

  It is dripping from the roofs of castles, from IVs.

  It is going where it is needed most. A.O. Hume

  made a customs line from a hedge. I am reading it

  now as the biergarten empties down the street. There is

  a tax so large it becomes a cavern. We ride through

  on a boat at a rate precipitated by stone.

  The water there is the purest. I can taste it with

  one finger. The German word for sea is meer and more

  is mehr. Residue, residual, knowing difference.

  ODE TO A QR CODE

  in the ornithology wing at the Natural

  History Museum, which I cannot scan because

  my position, alignment, and timing are not in

  sync with the encryptor. All the minor corrections

  in the world cannot replace broken trust, what was there

  at the start, a non-human voice, a silence that lives

  like a standing wave. When a scanner, and I mean I,

  cannot recognize a symbol, it will be treated

  as an erasure. Chances are, coloured hands touched those

  skins first. Coloured hands kept those blues and yellows alive,

  while tiny black squares in large white squares were enveloped

  by quiet zones. Are we not so lucky Emily

  Dickinson’s editor found her handwriting akin

  to fossil bird tracks? Every sign between me, dead bird,

  you, uniquely mapped to the sane polynomial?

  All the truth funds in the world cannot replace error.

  Justice is not the thing that seeks Quick Response, pattern,

  print, is not the thing that seeks conversion. Tag yourself.

  PART THREE

  ON THE NATURE OF THINGS

  Off-grid cabin for two nights with a generator

  and the bird you don’t know sounding

  above the non-white noise, a mid-generation’s

  tossing of dice. Thirty-five no’s before that much

  needed maybe. Ah, prospect. Oh, recovery.

  Some say the best thing for bird safety,

  heartbreak, and climate change is to think

  they’re the same thing. It’s true.

  When you speak long enough of a sonation,

  that last call you shouldn’t have answered

  with Scotch, dirty sheets, carbon footprints, a noted ji,

  atmospheric emissions, there appear feathers.

  Almost wrote fathers. They say a person

  with the condition of apraxia

  may not be able to pick up a phone

  when asked to but can do so without

  thinking when said phone rings.

  The truth is you only want to know who’s calling.

  So you describe it based on what you know

  right now. A whistle, a flute, a truncated sea-

  gull cry, a note like G, at times a trill,

  or else a sound as when the winds buffet

  with their blows and beat through the air

  a hanging garment or flying papers (Lucretius).

  The next day Andrea’s sister

  whom you’ve just met, who’s becoming

  a dentist shortly, who’ll be marrying

  a dentist-to-be shortly, answers “white-

  throated sparrow,” as if taking a stab in the dark

  but it sounds right and you keep saying it.

  Then it’s true and you don’t think

  to stop there, so you keep on saying it

  until it’s what you know to be true.

  WHITE-THROATED LAUGHING-THRUSH CAUGHT IN MY THROAT

  From April to June

  I watched the American

  robin’s theoretical eggs

  on the northwest corner

  of my front porch

  while reading about another

  bird theoretically

  laying her eggs

  “a deep and beautiful green,

  shining as if recently

  varnished” in the lower southern

  ranges of the Himalayas.

  My father’s sister, my bua, lives there.

  She went to the beauty

  parlour to have her face

  bleached but it turned out

  blue like Krishna’s

  or like robin eggs in the sense

  no one can explain precisely why.

  When she came for my wedding

  everyone asked one another

  if they had seen her face

  and only I answered

  no. Years later when her husband died

  I called her on my father’s insistence.

  I could not say any words

  beyond my own Sanskrit name

  as if it were a song, like shades of blue

  when they fall through cracks.

  “Their notes, though rather harsh,

  are very varied and quite conversational,”

  said Colonel G.F.L. Marshall

  in The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds.

  “The old bird will remain on the nest

  until within reach of the hand,” remarked

  Captain Hutton. “Do not call if you have nothing

  to say,” said my bua.

  RISING VARIANCE AS AN EARLY WARNING

  Today Mother transplanted herself to the back deck

  without the walker. It was the sun, her first time out

  since the fall. The verb falling, the fractures curing,

  her eyes closed when I joined her. “Days are becoming long,”

  she said. And then in Punjabi: “Two birds. One calling.

  One giving the answer.” I know and she knows she has

  never heard these birds before. It took me some forty

  years to learn such songs myself. But today’s back and forth

  feels like something new. The two-toned cardinals could be

  doing social work, averting warming, or slowing

  down time. Like that Chinese lake I read was flickering—

  alternating between its two states, dead or healthy—

  taking twenty years to settle on one. The birds are

  gone but I’m still
listening. One grandchild oscillates

  on the rusted swing set with past summers’ wasp nests thrice

  removed. Creak, creak. The visual is a sine wave that

  becomes near-sighted near the end. I still use that trick

  I discovered in childhood: if I want to be cured

  of hiccups I pretend to badly want the next one.

  I wish some things would just die a little more in spring.

  BRAIN HEMORRHAGE, EARLY FALL

  Found a dead bird on the rented back porch on Rice Lake.

  Found it. Not encountered it. More like: glad we did not

  not see it. It looked taxidermied, intentional.

  A sparrow. What kind? No one knew. We looked for telltale

  signs. Almost wrote sings. We are worse witnesses for death

  than for life. We saw yellow where there was not-yellow.

  We said a few words—not to honour it, nor even

  its species, neither of which we recognized, rather—

  in honour of all birds and the drop of blood on the

  improbable tip of its beak. Be-right red but not in

  the process of dripping. So many ways for it to

  not be human. But what if it was? The what-ifing

  of zoology, eulogy. Then the mate, the thing

  with feathers on the un-yellowing pine tip/our tongues.

  Hope, baby, hope, in the chillest land. My little girl

  sings signs “I love birds.” I lied about the cause of life.

  LIGHT IS THE FASTEST THING WE KNOW OF

  In the paleontonlogy museum

  in Tübingen

  everything is nested

  ammonites within ammonites