***

MANX SHORT CAKE – brittle and greasy – – BARLEY MEAL BONNAG – crisp

and entirely ragged, MOUNTAIN ASH JELLY – rowanberryish, jammy,

nontransparent – –.

outside the smaller one of the two barns,

this ram equates to a first cousin in the manx loaghtans’ system

of kinship, whereas these four lambkins equate to four grandkids, in the barnstable’s

corner. only just a few days old.

there at the fence stand in conjunction manx loaghtans’ mother, daughter, and the brother of grandpap.

they are survivors

of the death of john caesar bacon, here,

on the isle of man. this is the perfect darkness, and the perfect

definition, of the isle

of man. a basket of pears in the grass that you’ll find only in this place.

such rowanberries grow only right here.

neatly set table in front of tha house, delicious pastries upon it. annoyingly, some

bees upon it already. the good

wheat. the regional principle and the year, below hebrides, of A B C6

H10 O5. i’m wanting to tell you that an intelligence hovered through the sundrenched

garden. entered the garden through the backside, hovered over the loose

tiling past the gooseberry bushes, it

emerged through the freshly engrafted rods of the new

peas. (none of the animals tried to avoid it.) i’m wanting to tell you that it hovered through the barns,

and then wished to check inside the house if anyone was there. thus it found

that the house’s interior was not defined.

i’m wanting to tell you that thereupon it uttered a bloodcurdling howl,

pounced on to one of the manx loaghtans, made the cut

into the abdominal cavity, pulled aside the skin, and found that its interior was

not defined, too.

 

***

 

the glaciers push around everything, making a mess of geologic testimony, leaving behind

abrasions in the bedrock.

university helicopter landing site displays the signal of their pulse, in history,

onto which i sink, dawson’s moth on both of my eyes,

dawson’s moth on my mouth.

in the drapery spreading northeast around lake bonneville, since forever two universities,

hostile to one another, have taken hold, whose configuration

morphs with the ice sheet.

as chance has it, sometimes one and sometimes the other has the upper hand. on one of these days

dawson marched up the south side of lone peak,

and as he passed a rise, he discovered a new drilling site

right above his own project, which

since the nebraskan glaciation had produced great scientific avail, and for him

a considerable income.

an ice core is a beautiful and enigmatic artifact.

the word of the foundation of the first ūni, and the word of the foundation of all natural phenomena

are one, and the word of the counter-foundation of the other

ūni, and the word of the counter-foundation of all natural phenomena

are one. virtually transparent over large periods of time, the period of the foundations

in the core appears as a layer remaining

unfrozen, enclosing malodorous leaves and moldy, shivering moths. the great mystery

enclosed by perpetual ice

is the ice core’s extraction. when he, approaching, realized

the university-tattoo on my neck,

dawson gulped and struggled to inconspicuously button up his shirt, while the pulse in his temples

beat heavily. the natural law behind the phenomena, the investigation of which

i devoted all my years to, dawson,

is you.

 

---

 

There exists on the Isle of Man a local breed of sheep, the mouse-brown Manx Loaghtan, which economically grew out of fashion in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Just a handful of breeders of the more sentimental type remained as the ecological niche of that breed, in particular a man called John Caesar Bacon, to the effect that when Bacon passed away in 1916, the Manx Loaghtan population dropped eventually to no more than a few dozen. Since the 1990s, however, it has replenished and stabilized. How did this happen? Like the “rare breed” of the Manx language, which was threatened with extinction during most of the twentieth century as well—the last native speaker died of old age in 1974—the ewes and rams seem to have found a novel ecological niche in the idea of a Manx culture and heritage (and probably also its touristic marketability) in the brains of some of the human inhabitants of the Isle. They somehow started wanting to retain these generational objects once at the brink of annihilation. Thus if you visit the Isle today, you actually find real living Manx Loaghtan grazing on the meadows and real living people speaking Manx on the streets of Douglas.

Poems need places with names like the Isle of Man. Like the first poem above, they need stories such as these to shift them and recklessly scale them up: the Isle of Man is, indeed, the Earth in the Anthropocene. It is enclosed, ultra-small, and every single species found on the Isle ultimately depends on a loyal fan like John Caesar Bacon in order to survive. The genealogies of the tribes of Manx Loaghtan, the families of John Caesar Bacon and the other breeders, and the cultural species that is the Manx language, intertwine in the most delicate and concrete fashion on that Isle where we all live. There are no undomesticated animals, people, and languages in an Anthropocene biosphere whose ultimate ambition may be defined as becoming an artificial Holocene—a Holocene sustainable over long periods of time, thereby freezing and eternalizing the evolutionarily produced, hence somewhat arbitrary content of holocenic Earth. But what else would there be to preserve? A good Anthropocene is a Holocene museum, ecologically, just as the Isle of Man is a museum of the Manx Loaghtan and speakers of Manx.

That cognitive dispositions and processes have material consequences—like the emergence and survival of a particular breed of domesticated animal—is a quintessentially anthropocenic observation. Italian geologist Antonio Stoppani notes as early as 1873 that “[a] future geologist, wishing to study our epoch’s geology, would end up narrating the history of human intelligence,”11Antonio Stoppani, “Corso di Geologica” (excerpt), tr. Valeria Federighi and Etienne Turpin, in: Elisabeth Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse (eds), Making the Geologic Now: Responses to material conditions of contemporary life. New York: Punctum Books, 2013, pp. 34–41, here p. 40. thereby marking the human population’s general intellect as the single most powerful material agent on the planet, today effecting changes to the Earth system that can only be modeled by diving into deep geologic time; a scale at which events like glaciations come and go in quick succession, all the way since the current Ice Age kicked in some 2.6 million years ago (of which the Nebraskan glaciation is the first in North America). This, incidentally, is also the global climate-change event that likely was instrumental in the evolutionary separation of the hominines from their biological ancestors—being the prehistory of that which much later would come to be the “universities” of the General Intellect. The second poem conjoins these threads. It also affirms, in fact, that this is the only past humans could ever have observed; because every other course of events would not have allowed them to come about as observers: “the great mystery / enclosed by perpetual ice / is the ice core’s extraction.”

But the virtual inception of the universities in the Nebraskan is here portrayed as an essentially gothic event, an event that remains undead in the workings of nature, unable to become part of the historical record that is so neatly displayed in the transparent core. Maybe this is due to the utter antagonism through which thought, as it violently de-geologizes the Earth, ultimately uncovers nothing but itself: its sole object being the total conditions of its own becoming. The poem has designated a particular word for this—that word is Dawson.