If you’re wondering why I love to buttress my writing with poetry, I’ll let a poet tell you.

“It is, of course, we who house poems as much as their words, and we ourselves must be the locus of poetry’s depth of newness. Still, the permeability seems to travel both ways: a changed self will find new meanings in a good poem, but a good poem also changes the shape of the self. Having read it, we are not who we were the moment before…. Art lives in what it awakens in us… Through a good poem’s eyes we see the world liberated from what we would have it do. Existence does not guarantee us destination, nor trust, nor equity, nor one moment beyond this instant’s almost weightless duration. It is a triteness to say that the only thing to be counted upon is that what you count on will not be what comes. Utilitarian truths evaporate: we die. Poems allow us not only to bear the tally and toll of our transience, but to perceive, within their continually surprising abundance, a path through the grief of that insult into joy.” ― Jane Hirshfield

Endangered Species

Dan Beachy-Quick

Even this
brief thought is endless. A
man speaks as if unaware of the
erotic life of the ampersand. In the
isolate field he comes to count one by
one the rare butterflies as they
die. He says witness is to say what
you mean as if you mean it. So many
of them are the color of the leaves
they feed on, he calls sympathy a fact, a
word by which he means to make a claim
about grace. I have in my

life said many things I did not
exactly mean. Walk
graceless through the field. Graceless so
the insects leap up into the blank
page where the margins fill
with numbers that speak diminishment.
Absence as it nears also offers astonishment.
Absence riddles even this
briefest thought, here
is your introduction to desire, time’s
underneath where the roots root down
into nothing like loose threads
hanging from the weaving’s underside.
No one seeing the roots
can guess

at the field above. Green
equation that ends in yellow
occasions. Theory is
insubstantial. The eye latches on
to the butterflies as they fly
and the quick heart follows, not
a root in nothing but a thread across
abstraction. They fly away.
What in us follows we do not name.
What the butterflies pull out us
as in battle horses pull
chariot, we do not

name. But there is none, no battle,
no surge, no retreat, a field
full not of danger, but the endangered,
where dust-wings pull from us
what we thought we lost, what theory
denies, where in us ideas go to die,
and thought with the quaking grass quakes.
Some call it breath but I’m still breathing.
So empty I know I’m not any emptier.
On slim threads they pull it out me,
disperse—no
one takes notes—disappear, &

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About This Poem

“Most immediately, ‘Endangered Species’ responds to the gradual disappearance of a number of butterfly species, most notably the monarch. But in more abstract ways, the poem tries to work within that oldest sense of reciprocity, wherein what damage occurs in the world, also occurs within those considering it, and that realm of thought and idea, so easily assumed to be caught in ideals and so free from actual diminishment, is also diminished—as the world is what one thinks about, and to lose it, is also to witness the loss of the mind.”
—Dan Beachy-Quick

“those who sing, pray twice.” St. Augustine

Chicago to Madrid

Eight hours plane flight ahead. I found a good hostel to stay at for two nights in Granada but it was pricier than I liked. I read Anne Carson on the flight from Seattle to Chicago because I left my earbuds in my check in bag (I’m carrying a small drawstring pack on the plane). Last year I lost my earbuds at the airplane and had to walk the Camino without the aid of my own personal soundtrack, so thanks again, St. James, for the small miracle in the airport.

Between Carson’s powerful clean prose and the neurotic self awareness of the man who was sitting to my left on the plane (touch between men remains a strange issue on planes), I can’t help but wonder, as I move through this airport, how the space I am moving in is a product of architectural engineering; a feat impossible without our modern notion of space. Everything is so compartmentalized, clean black rows of chairs splayed neatly before boarding gates. How efficient does one have to move before his movement becomes sterilized? Surely there is no grace and providence at work in the gait of a window shopper at the mall, but what about the passenger shuttling himself between terminals? I am not optimistic, the airport feels too neat for serendipity (I say this as my own thoughtlessness deprived me of my earphones!)

I’ve also taken some time to look into Allison Raju’s guidebook, which will be the guidebook I will be following for the Camino Mozarabe. First impressions are: housing looks exceptionally bleak. The first stay out of Granada is at a center for disabled youth; Allison also stresses that anyone without a “reasonable command of Spanish” will find this route exceptionally difficult. Dios, ayudarme! (not to mention her guide comprises solely of directive sentences: turn L at the….then 200 km later turn L….) Jeez.

Anyway, touchdown, Granada!

edit: turns out I packed the wrong moleskin, so I’ll be picking up another pilgrims journal in Granada….

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