Charles Hoy Fort was a writer and researcher of odd phenomena
 
What does cheese taste like
or water, for that matter . . .
a blueberry is not an orange
yet both categorized as fruit, in size
like, oh say, planets Mercury and Jupiter,
but taste, and feel on the tongue,
the way it winds through our innards . . .
what's to become of all this?
 
As 2011 began, birds fell from the sky,
fish washed up on the shore, and Charles Hoy Fort
fell along with them to the Earth in bits of paper,
overturned shoeboxes of research, prophetic confetti,
he landed in our fields and he washed up on our shores,
shores damned by the religion of science
whose explanations have excluded the unexplainable
 
shores ignored and unheralded by the mindless,
rivers unrecognized because too many stuck on whether
it's a river or a channel of water or sacred fishing ground
or a hazardous dumping site or a bunch of molecules who
agreed to get together and eternally party in the form of water.
 
What difference does it make if it's called global warming
or climate change or just another cycle of the cosmic mind,
can we just get along and deal with it, consider how to be
(just in case) ready for climate refugees which includes birds
and fish, and the like, whose habitats are being affected,
try to stem the Fortean snows of paperwork from the skies,
preferring to read him with calm airs, or in the march of
warm weather's garden snails plodding across the patio . . .
 
                                * * * * *
 
PS
"Updated timeline of mysterious animal deaths"

 
Mankh (Walter E. Harris III) is a frequent guest poet and essayist on Axis of Logic. He is a writer, small press publisher, and Turtle Islander. You can contact him via his literary website.

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