This morning in Sacramento I learned
that an email has a smaller footprint
than a postcard, unless the email
carries a large attachment like a
feature-length film or a high-resolution
map of the world with all the cities and
mountains and seas colored in, the green
trenches which plunge miles down swallowing
light where creatures move blindly,
as we used to move before we lit the world
and burnt coal to heat rooms and power
trains and cut down all the old-growth forests
to build houses or mine shafts and lay
the railroad ties, so that the silver and
gold blasted from the earth could be
carted out to city centers and turned
into wealth and used to construct even
bigger edifices of granite from the quarries
in Folsom or Penryn, or sandstone from
the Bay Area, sometimes brick from local
clay pits or the cheapest most available material
like adobe, but that resembled the past,
so with time and new fortunes marble
came from Vermont or from the creamy
veins found in Georgia, traveling around Cape Horn
on boats (made from the cut-down old-
growth forests) alongside the highest-end
marble imported from Carrara in Italy
where it’s been quarried for two thousand years,
now here it is in the Leland Stanford Mansion
in Sacramento, in the foyer, in the fireplace mantel,
when I pause in the gift shop after a tour on
an unusually hot afternoon in March and try to
decide whether to buy a postcard to send to my
niece in England this journey spins in my head,
as the central air swirls around the upper reaches
of the old salon where the rails that connected
there with here were planned, but also libraries
established, groceries imported and exported,
he had a family, Stanford, his son dying
young even if he was a baron and powerful, so
he, too, may have wondered what the weight
of a soul was and how do you address it—by
pen or typewriter or telegram? Or do you content
yourself to simply think of the person, as I am this hot
afternoon, thinking of my dear niece, who is
probably bent over a textbook in Manchester,
studying electric race car engines
or how to say greetings in Arabic like,
hello dear Uncle, which is how she addresses
me, and when she does all that weighs me down lifts
and I will do anything for her, as anyone
loved and who loves will move mountains, move rock,
but are there not also ways to do this without
taking until it is all gone? All the ore all the trees
all the marble all the fish all the gold all the silver
all the rivers all the oil all the redwoods all the soil
all the salmon all the oaks, I try to fathom coming
upon a forest of trees several thousand years old
and seeing money, when the workers
gathered piles of fallen limbs
and trunks, they lit slash
fires to clear away the undesirable and
unprofitable leftovers, and when they
started uncontrollable blazes
did they not think then that they were
making hell on earth?—or maybe
when they saw the burned landscape,
the remaining fire resistant giants
barely charred, they began to
understand that there is much on this planet we should
not burn or destroy and it begins with
the land
and the rivers and the sky, I put all this in a postcard
to my niece later from my desk, not a new card from
the gift shop but an old one from a visit to Phoenix,
the least environmentally sustainable city on the planet
at the moment, but I don’t send it, as I have also learned
the cost of sending a postcard is a backpack-size volume
of CO2 which is about the same measure of carbon we exhale
in half a day and so I wrote this poem
for her instead and when I see her next I plan to sit down
in the long summer light of England beneath the shade
of the great oak tree in her yard and read this poem
to her with the air in my lungs, air which is not eternal,
but at least mining it has not killed anyone or cut down
a tree or diverted a river, even if my ancestors surely did
this and more and passed to me the inheritance of a world
in which more has to mean less if we are to live.•
Join us on Thursday, July 17, at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Rosanna Xia will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and special guest Marthine Satris to discuss California Against the Sea: Visions for Our Vanishing Coastline. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
