poetry

From "Poems from Amsterdam: A Cycle"
by J. Neil C. Garcia

LII

Paroxysms of rain are drowning cities
but the whole world is thirsty for oil—
is waging wars across deserts to get it.

Millennia of human thought and industry
can only arrive at the same bright spot:
fire that blazed in the first cosmic breath

and now blazes in the hearts of the engines
that turn and power and warm our lives.
And this dependence wasn't always the case,

though oil had always oozed out like gleet
from crags on the wounded earth's surface.
Ochre, pitch, or the color of straw, it was used

by the ancients to mummy their dead,
glue together hewn blocks of their temples,
caulk the seams of their boats, even heal

the mangy hide of their lumbering beasts.
And before fueling the first torch or lamp,
it was sold as a tonic and an unguent for gout,

and was despised when it spurted out of wells
from which fresh water or brine was expected.
And what exactly is oil? In the beginning

it was life, crude and numberless in the sea,
or on land as crawling animal or vegetation,
that settled and settled and layered into shale,

pressed and heated and distilled by bacteria
into liquid or gas, and trapped inside domes
of permeable stone. This took eons, of course,

for now we have oil, the condition of our being
and the source of its woes, including the arrows
and slings of outrageous weather, glaciers melting,

rainforests reduced to brown kindling by drought.
And to think it all began from white heat in a cell—
in a body that burned out and burns on in the world.

In the beginning, as in the end, is the light.

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