Jim’s Barn Series #2, Pastel, by John Cummings
Fungus and Find Out
Black knot consumes a plum tree.
The black knot is covered in green moss.
This is new.
The devourer of bark and pith
is itself devoured. Maybe.
I wait. I watch.
Moss protects a tree forest from infection,
but we know little about an orchard;
sprayed, controlled, industrial as the
black knot fungus that we
cultivate in consequence.
__________________
Terry Trowbridge
Review by Jared Pearce
What I like best here is the tension between the sense of discovery, observation, and the definiteness of the poem’s conclusion. I’m not sure there’s a way to reconcile those positions and I’m definitely not convinced that the poems thinks there is, either.
Review by Massimo Fantuzzi
Famine was the mark of a maturing agricultural society, the very badge of civilization. (From Richard Manning, Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization)
We know little about an orchard, our labor, or the impact of our industry. A growing polarization and hysteria are taking the respective forms of science, doom, entitlement, hope, and faith, depending on which day of the calendar or TV channel we are surfing. We live through a civil war of information, chaos and anarchy of statements unchecked and unregulated. These verses remind me that there is a third way of approaching the truth: the artist’s way, the observation, the quiet listening of life growing around us, the wait, the watch, for the miracle to fulfill its promise. Patience and curiosity are a real novelty these days. In this suspension, where no answers are sought nor preached, no promises, no big sales are at stake, no otherworldly alliances are filed, no commandments, no laws, of physics, or economics, we just might be able to access reality. To be part of the ecosystem, to trust, accept and follow its timings, to live not above it, not in ownership, not in slavery.