Four Poems

from The End of the Long Streams

east branch

Call it Superfund Quay or Arbitration Inlet
names are remorse’s ornaments
the science fiction to demonology pipeline
watchwords at the end of a long dissolution
Still these symbols work their shame
the old fashioned way: through dream
Little Dresden and Dimes Square
disgrace chases a strange endocrinology which chases
the Golden Ratio which chases the bed
installed so hopefully in the cosmopolis
Two feet are no match for a fractal coast: wrong

english kills

Flowering tree entelechy or on this planet spring
The hillside heavy with mausoleums drops
down to the embankments and pocket parks
Paulownia trees twist up from
the glue boom’s imperial runoff
Aftermath ecologies traffic their catalogs
of generative affliction the same way
people have for generations: to give description
something to do
A fine mist of prallethrin over the inlet
You choose grief: you have a fondness for buzzwords 

whale creek

Across the water is Bristol Basin’s ballast palisade
The microphalluses of Hercules
After the Blitz bits of the city were made
to weigh down the Allies’ ships
The empire’s unwavering will to expand still
made a Little Bristol: another decoy city milled
into the excurrent middenly: are middens good?
Do they symbolize nascent abuse?
Or do they show us innocence: beaver dam alluvion
Decoy and reversal: their anagram camouflage
fools the cycle into restoring one fate to the next

the turning basin

So what do some conchologists do? Precision syringe squirt
the ideogram for profusion on my schism-soiled apron
That shall be the primeval forest you start from scratch
But first one more punishing flight of metacognition
The Fire Island salt holly drinks from a freshwater lens
Wallace’s Night Heron: wobbly juvenile: its archival aliveness
from Nightsoil Wharf: Cologne Gulch: so you say: Jim Cantore
our bard of disaster: it’s time to mash the lanternflies into
a sweet-smelling paste: this truly is the Irradiated Riviera
and here just above the high filth mark it will be a dragonhoard’s
tidy nativity scene that changes the nature of osmosis

∩

Peter Milne Greiner is from Otis, Massachusetts. He works on Governors Island.