He laments how landscapes go unloved
then lost when ancient words for sceneries
And weathers are forgotten
So “rionnach maoim’s” looming extinction
Means few moorland ramblers
Will see “those rivers of shadows
Flowing at your feet as clouds
Pass over on a sunny, blustery day.”
And then there’s the endangered species
Of so much colorful, local speech
Where only buzzed, Ulster fishermen
Sizzle with the word “crizzle”
When insisting there’s “a feint sound
Water makes when hard-en-ing
Into ice….” Still poets, he knows,
Create these wild preserves
For rare, dying words to thrive
Beneath the Pyrenees peaks of their
Etymologies. And so combing through
The Gaelic anthologies, he dreams
Of that lost lexicon for the infinite
Variations of highland canyon fog—
Or, maybe say, a forgotten thesaurus
for old growth forests whose barks’ primal braille,
alone, surely can set the mind awhirl
with wonder words. But for now,
no scholar or non-profit is petitioning
to preserve “glassel’s” rare word of paradise
So future beach combers have a term
For “that smooth seaside pebble
Which, when wet, was shiny and inspiring
But, after taking home, is now just
A lump of stone….” And so our word-hoard
endures this Amazon-like extirpation of words
By revisiting “The Peat Bog Glossary’s”
Two-hundred-plus terms for moss.
And between sips of single malt scotch
he curses the new Junior OED replacing
buttercup, heron, mistletoe, and Hopkin’s kingfisher
So kids are fluent in the “consensus reality”
Of chatroom, broadband, cut n paste
And celebrity….Oh, but bless his quest
To re-wild our English “blandscape”
Inspiring a few wordsmiths to work
The rare forgotten term of “eit”
Into the coho salmon documentary
So more folks might imagine
“That sheening quartz villagers set
In the stream to reflect moonlight
And attract salmon back to
Their nets.” And as he explores,
now, tomes of Icelandic Sagas
And ancient Doric translations,
May we reacquire our taste
For the venison-like verbs
Of the old vernaculars
So “blinter’s” rare songbird of word
Might once more soar when seeking
To articulate “the radiance of stars
On a clear cold winter night.”
And may our bards and artists restore
these ten-thousand vanishing species
of speech so each future child
can utter Hopkins’s “haze-fire”
To “the luminous morning mist
Through which the rising sun is
Shining poetic” and know, finally,
the amazing power of nouns!
Think, now, of the vast ecosystem
Of speech regreening if following
this Thoreau of thesauruses
And exhaling “endolphin”
To celebrate “that happy
chemical release when diving
into the ocean surf.” How lovely to think
some verdant Eden might slowly be
restored by simply decreeing “Plato’s fire”
when seeing “light dancing inside
a tree hollow on a sunny day.”
How heartening to imagine
We might return to the
good graces of some God of Gaia
when merely noticing “those autumn spiders’
shining filaments of web spun across
swaths of horizon at dawn or dusk”
and softly declaiming to maple,
crow, north facing moss, or God?
glossomer, glossomer, glossamer….
—
Dennis Camire is the author of the poetry collections, Anthology of Awe and Wonder (Deerbrook Editions), Combed by Crows (Deerbrook Editions), and Stone by Stone (Finishing Line Press), and teaches at Central Maine Community College. The former director of Maine Poetry Central and the founder of The Portland Poet Laureate Program, his work has appeared in The Mid-American Review, Poetry East, Spoon River Review, Lothlorien Review, Alluvium, Amethyst, Café Review, Canary, Hamilton Stone Review, Speckled Trout Review, and on Maine Public Radio. He lives in an A-frame in West Paris, Maine. He is also the “spokes-poet” for the mom-and-pop owned company, “Soil Foods,” which farms worms for worm castings.
