Lane

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john

lane

spartanburg

1984-1985

Poetry

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Elegy for Sugar Sand and Slash Pine

Charismatic Microfauna

John Lane, professor of English and Environmental Studies and director of the Goodall Environmental Studies Center at Wofford College, is the author of a dozen books of poetry and prose, including six from the University of Georgia Press. Lane’s first novel, Fate Moreland’s Widow, was published by the late Pat Conroy’s Story River Books in early 2015. His latest nonfiction book, Coyote Settles the South, named one of the year’s “Nature Books of Uncommon Merit” by The Burroughs Society, was published in spring of 2016 by the University of Georgia Press, and his latest poetry collection Anthropocene Blues was published in fall of 2017 by the Mercer University Press. Three of Lane’s stories have been selected for the South Carolina Fiction Project. He was awarded the SC Arts Commission’s Individual Arts Fellowship in 1984 and the Phillip D. Reed Memorial Award for Outstanding Writing on the Southern Environment by the Southern Environmental Law Center in 2001. In 2012, his selected poems, Abandoned Quarry, was named Poetry Book of the Year by Southeastern Independent Booksellers Alliance SIBA. In 2014 he was inducted into the SC Academy of Authors. He, with his wife Betsy Teter, are co-founders of the Hub City Writers Project.

Elegy for Sugar sand
and Slash Pine

John Lane

Feet above sea level five miles

out Cape San Blas, at low tide.

“This strand will be underwater

in fifty years,” Betsy said earlier

at breakfast, our B&B fellow

guests nodding in agreement,

then adding their home range too,

Philly, another coastal hotspot

with city charter that would be

voided in a geologic minute

by sea level rise. Today

seems at least superficially

a beauty, yellow butterflies,

a few migrating monarchs,

a ubiquitous osprey fishing

the shallow channel behind

the beach. But the old normal

is not the new normal,

instead, every glacier calves

oblivion. We ascend twenty-foot

dunes at the state park, built up

by prevailing winds and tides.

A woman huffs up from the gravel

parking lot, complains, “You

pay for this view.” Her husband,

tan as a vanilla wafer, stalls

before he can see the Gulf,

his plastic Crocs filled

with sand like concrete

overshoes. When I achieve

the dune line’s last summit

I feel surprisingly dystopic --

before me, Cormac McCarthy’s

final scene in The Road,

a barren empty shore,

a stretch of sugar sand

and slash pine, a few

sharp blades of palmetto,

a raw ocean to the horizon’s

end. All that’s missing is

the beached plundered tanker

and the petroleum smell

of apocalypse. I watch a swarm

of dragonflies like black drones

buzz the terrain, nothing hurried

about their tactics. Last night

we ate crabs safe in their dark

pot of sea water until it boiled.

Charismatic Microfauna

John Lane

What of the myriad city ants, whose food chains

include crickets or fallen potato chips and scraps

of hotdogs; ant colonies under the hot sledges

of Manhattan concrete, or foraging in the Galapagos

of avenue medians; what of the lentic margins

of public ponds, the unpronounceable, the chaetonotus,

cypris, daphnia, hydra, macrothrix,and rotifers

caucusing and cavorting in each muddy dollop;

and what of pastures easily praised, that humming

we hear as an exultation, the Orthoptera,

grasshoppers, katydids, crickets, mantids;

and what of the crumbling stump where we might sing

of the worker termite, translucent as alabaster,

or the horntail, polished black, with its appetite

for auguring into solid standing pine boles?