Mr. Buell makes the big time, talking (albeit briefly) about Manhattan mastodons to NPR’s science writer Robert Krulwich. A four-minute piece of audio is available at the top of the page.
That’s the second time in a couple weeks NPR has covered coevolution of plants and Pleistocene megafauna. I smell a fad. By summer, I expect an all-Osage-orange channel on basic cable.
The osage orange
A compound drupe
Chartreuse and bumpy—
the dysfunctional fruit.
(Source: Antiques Road Show, nightstand misattributed to E. Dickinson.)
The last time I walked
With a sloth, it was twelve
Thousand years ago,
Osage oranges in my jacket.
Remember. Frost melting
Glacier yielding, mass death,
Megafauna gone,
As we ran from
The short-faced bear whose
Cruel eyes burned yellow
Night and day, in any weather.
Dire wolf barked at me, until
She came out bearing
Clovis points, face bright
With blood. A smilodon
Grabbed her shoulder, and dragged
Her down the street, into
A big tar pit by a line
Of Osage orange trees
(Source: Gary Sototherium)
BOIS D’ARC
Chartreuse, tuberculated—Friend, advance.
My coat’s adroop with megafruit, o megafaun,
the osage orange. A compound drupe, your final dawn
contains its dusk—but drag a slothful dance
with me; ignore my pocket sharps. For chance
may prove your only fear the Smiledon’s smooth yawn;
ingest the wrinkled spheres. Til all globelight is gone
glow poison pill of Pleistocene romance.
————-
————-
Obviously, not so much poem fragment as a cry for help.
This is just to say
I have not eaten
the Maclura
that were in
the ice age
and which
were probably
counting
on seed dispersal
Forgive me
I was delicious
wild meat
in times cold
(it was inevitable.)
Inevitable, and yet oddly satisfying.
I dreamed a variation last night with the little lame balloon man, but it evaporated.