Nowhere near here is a jabberwocky

Wendy Schaffer

From pheasants' gold
and frabjous skies,
under a plate of cheap clouds
named raw, simple, loneliness, the river's
miles clustered time, and cranes removed the weeds,
all nightbirds and now and then a harsh-named tree. People,
thin and thistled, with rich industrial jaws and claws neglected
night-smelling silence where, luminously, wheat rested. Sun, joy, grain,
suddenly dead. Hedges piled where water went wraths. 
Doors, trolleys galumphing, fishy chortled 
red through scarfed desires, 
wives scattered up spires. 
"Urban", thought He, reach-of-all.
Beyond the slithy smog,
flameblade and unfettered,
swinging statues,

stood a two-bird day.

The Science

Inspired by In a world without people, how fast would NYC fall apart?, this poem follows a city, from claiming marshlands along a river bank, through urbanization and environmental catastrophe. Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky is a metaphor for a fire-breathing human industrial complex that lays waste to a landscape. But as described in the article, with its decline, it will be no more than a mythical beast. Carroll's invented words are pollutants, but they also construct this unnatural environment where pollution's impact is both unfathomable and familiar: evening fragrances of the marshland ecology lost, grain dead of chemical pollutants in the soil, flooding due to overpaving and polluted storm runoff, while fish and other native species evolve and adapt to the polluted landscape in frightening ways. The poem's form suggests a skyscraper, with its tower the toxic human impact on the ecosystem. Then the lines decline in length, as the city falls. The poem ends with a pause, the city unpeopled, followed by (possibly) a repopulated and less polluted day.

The Poet

Wendy Schaffer received her PhD in physics from Columbia University, MD from Cornell University and is a prior American Association for the Advancement of Science Mass Media Fellow. She writes from New York City, where she mends broken hearts as a cardiologist. She is grateful for recent publications in The Modern Artist, reᐧmediate, and *82 review.

Next poem: Passage by Jeff Howard