weeds

late capitalist liminal landscape

stable diffusion prompt, “late anthropocene picture frame.”

i remember those final days of plenty, before that retraction and the water that disappeared, sucked into the glittering sand beneath my feet. walk barefoot along the coast and pause when you feel warmth beneath the wet sand. let the next wave come, sink you down to your ankles, and feel the little clams flutter up over your toes, subsume the broad span of your midfoot. their tiny bodies, fingernail shells in blue, purple, yellow, white and every variagation—their tiny bodies and the bacteria they harbor here cast more warmth than the sun.

the failure begins like this, too, one wave after another. perhaps it does not begin with heat, but with ice. for when there is a polar vortex, the concern ought not be the sudden rush of cold, but the wave that draws the cold out from where it should be and spatters it onto us, gorgeous ice and snow and water that evaporates straight from a hot pan into the air, instant dissipation.

a copse is cut down, hewn to stumps with weedy shoots struggling up from those tired roots. or rather, no human hand holds that cruel axe directly: enough late ice, year after year, breaks down the trees until they capitulate. they can no longer transfer nutrients to their fellows through their living meshwork of roots; they become scared and selfish, and years of burned buds and stunted growth take their toll. they give up.

i keep a clam shell on my desk. it’s big, four inches across, with rings of growth demarcating each season; perhaps this clam was twenty, thirty years old when it died. the early rings, built when this clam was young, are thick and strong; the final ones, weakened by acidification, are thin and chipped. but i can make it out, can see those little rings, counting ten years of stunted growth in the space, each smaller and weaker and more desperate than the last.

we say we are dying. we can feel it happening, that slow choking death that is coming for us. perhaps we can buy a little time, string ourselves along for just a little bit longer.we take walks on the trail and try not to notice as the forest fails, unable to sustain the thick net of seething life that it needs to put out that lovely soft shade that we need in these hot, hot summers. the shoots give up. scrubby survivors eke it out until they shed their bark and rise up to haunt the side of a creek as silvery specters, reminders of what was once possible.

when we are dead, or perhaps before, one of those old trees will be struck by lightening. perhaps it won’t start smouldering. perhaps it will just fall, just sink, and all those dead roots that used to hold it down are gone and it lifts up great chunks of earth, grasping onto this planet and this soil even as its slow dissipation begins.

i do not think the future will be a hellscape of things always burning, parched earth, sterile moonscape earth. we will pass away, a species that dreamed and deluded itself into doom, and what will be left behind? it will be scrubland that goes forever, decayed malls run rampant with ivy, suburbia left empty. grass grows on the roofs, accumulating enough weight and eating away enough beams through years of water and rot, with each seasonal cycle of heat and cold, to collapse them inward. and the rats will nest, and the birds will roost, and the worms will write, and snakes will take refuge in what used to be basement, and the weeds will eat all of it

.

the weeds will grow, proliferant, verdant, and they will send down their roots: artemesia, queen anne’s lace, hemlock, feral wheat. they will sprout between cracks in the concrete. they will sprout through our graves. they have become strong, resistant to agricultural poison, two centuries of unnatural selection and they will eat all of this, they will consume what used to be folly and emptiness.

are we dreamers not weeds?