Nature – Page 2 – Jason Crane

Inventory Of An Evening Walk

Three humans with four dogs.
Well, three if I don’t count myself,
who I can see from the chest down.
A deer, from ten feet away.
A fox, fleet of foot, from fifty.
A hundred fireflies —
lightning bugs, says Patrick —
and dozens of bats to snatch them.

/ / /

17 June 2023
Charlottesville VA

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POEM: How Can We Sleep

Published 6 June 2023 by Jason Crane

How Can We Sleep

I’m sitting in a camp chair
on the concrete rectangle
I call my front porch.

The catbirds are squabbling
in the Adam’s needle;
the neighbor kids are shooting hoops.

I’m trying to read a book of poems
about the environmental crisis,
but my eyes are stinging from smoke

that has traveled all the way to Virginia
from wildifes in Quebec and Nova Scotia,
nearly a thousand miles away.

“The earth is not dying, it is being killed,
and those who are killing it
have names and addresses.”

Now one of the neighbor kids is crying.
Maybe she knows
our days are numbered.

/ / /

6 June 2023
Charlottesville VA

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Meet Gulliver

Published 20 May 2023 by Jason Crane

Meet Gulliver. (UPDATE BELOW) I’ve said for many years that it’s not good for someone to be the only living thing in their home, whether that means having a partner or a pet or a plant. Gulliver is a wandering dude, aka silver inch plant, aka tradescantia zebrina. He was mailed to me all the way from Texas by my friend Amber, who cut him from her own plant. After many weeks and one additional trim, he’s tiny but he has roots. His dad plant has been around since 2004, so he’s got good genes. What you’re seeing in this photo isn’t the tip of the iceberg — it’s the whole iceberg. He’s got about a 1/2″ of stalk and some little root filaments in the pot, which I put him in yesterday. I named him Gulliver because of the wandering connotation, and because he’s tiny now but will hopefully get big, and there are many size and perspective shifts in Gulliver’s Travels, which is one of my favorite books. Send him — and his caretaker — good vibes, because I definitely don’t know what I’m doing.

(UPDATE: I took a photo of Gulliver in the Picture This app and it turns out he’s not a wandering dude [tradescantia zebrina] but instead a purple heart [tradescantia pallida]. But I’m keeping the name.)

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