Utica to Little Falls & Amsterdam to Albany
UTICA TO LITTLE FALLS
25.5 miles (June 20)
The emptiness of names
comes at me like a sharp wind
but spares me the cruelty
as I pass through the chasm
that engulfs Six Nations
Apartments, a HUD complex
near the corner of Jay
and Mohawk. Managed
by Intercoastal Property
Services, based in Gulf Breeze,
Florida, near the corner
of capitalism creates
so many administrators
and so many corpses
like the lot full of
abandoned semi-trailers
on the eastern edge
of the city.
At first I wanted
to call them truck beds,
envisioning their sleepers
as widows of commerce
liberated from that unhappy
marriage, a chasm
overtaken by grapevines,
mugwort, black locust, and sweet –
my phone hears sleep –
clover with its long tendrils
nodding off in the heat
of early summer, flecked
or fact that follows
disregard with creamy
yellow petals and greenish
not-yet flowers (sours)
waving in the wind
of mechanical
mishearing.
Iambic thoughts
go chasing trochaic
clouds that hover over
valleys carved by glaciers.
All of the waters
of the Great Lakes
passed through this chasm,
the plaque in Little Falls
says. Their echoes
come at me through
striations that rise,
if only briefly, above
the Anthropocene.
AMSTERDAM TO ALBANY
53 miles (June 22)
What invisible uniform
hangs from my body
as I sift the air around
the dream of lifting water?
My labor unalienated
and peripheral as I record
a worker in a quasi-
hazmat suit painting
the railing yellow
like the tractor just
a couple kilometers
east of here, a yellow
so large it swallows,
like the quarry, the worker
inside, backing into
a glittering dune (tune),
a b-side that used to be
a hillside, so soft and full
of lights it forgets
its own brokenness
for a moment
and I feel like
I could swim through it
and I wonder how
is water, where and when
and why is water also
mined (mind)? The dune
(tune) blurs into the shade
of woods into the bright
ki ki ki ki ki ki of the
Northern Flicker
who punctures the sound
of human-made extraction
who drums on trees to
mark its territory
like signs that puncture
the trunks of white pines
and hemlocks in Niskayuna –
a name misheard inside
the once extensive
maize fields punctured
by Dutch settlers – with
the words Property
of General Electric Global
Research Facility, a uniform
for trees turned involuntary
enforcers. Down the road,
an ocean of cars undulates
in the parking lot
of the Knolls Atomic
Power Laboratory
whose nuclear fleets
drum out territory
on farther oceans.
Strange green pipes
puncture the hillside,
jutting out like lower-case
r’s spelling rip and rend
and reap and repurpose
spelling U.S. Department
of Energy affixed to a fence
(offense). I look up
to find my invisible
uniform hanging from
cumulonimbus and follow
its vapor into a chorus
of naked trees rising
from a marsh. What are they/
were they singing and what
would it take to hear it?
The labor of poetry
responds to questions
with answers so obviously
wrong that they refract
into further mystery,
spelling diaphanous
and tangle and hum and
dust and spin. It watches
ghosts of glacial lakes
and rivers spill over
Cohoes Falls, which
the great magnifiers called
a barrier. But falling
is only a barrier if you
stand in opposition to it.
//
Brent Armendinger (he/him) is the author of Street Gloss (The Operating System, 2019) and The Ghost in Us Was Multiplying (Noemi Press, 2015), both of which were finalists for the California Book Award in Poetry. As a poet, he is interested in queer embodiment, site-specific practice, and ritual procedures. He has composed poems while searching for the meanings of words on the streets of Buenos Aires, doing walking meditation in the Arroyo Seco in Los Angeles, and cycling the Erie Canalway Trail between Buffalo and Albany in New York. Brent teaches creative writing at Pitzer College and lives in Los Angeles.
