The Weight of Waves 


El Niño
Diane Kendig


                        According to an early observer of El Niño,
                  years of abundance
                  (años de abundancia) followed and the sea
                  was full of wonders.
                         — R.C. Murphy in Geography Review, 1926


Nothing new in name, El Niño. "Años de abundancia"
they described the years that followed it in Peru.  Años de ansia
followed those, I would imagine, at least in the town of Moche.  Sí, a

sacrifice of 90 people there in 600 A.D., an abundance
of human life taken to restore the lack of sardines, that dance
of death, as once the rhythm was called, meaning worms and ants

crawling over corpses created los daños
that recreated, eventually, rich earth—but only after años,
a rise and fall we can read in tree rings held up on TV, given us, nos

dan, to look at and behold the damages
and growth in thin and wide concentric images
of what weather occurred in each season across the ages.

Such warmth at Christmas met with such cariño
that the sailors called the Southern Oscillation El Niño,
such a positive force to them, so wondrous.  To us, now, negative.  No

wonders mark its meaning, no affection.
Rather, it's thought of in all its harshness, a flexion
of our view to the droughts and floods when the land goes into action.



~~~~~~~~~~
Diane Kendig, a poet, writer, and translator, is author of three chapbooks, most recently Greatest Hits, 1978-2000 (Pudding House). Her poetry and nonfiction have appeared in the journals Colere, Ekphrasis, Minnesota Review, Mid-America, U.S. 1 and Slant, among others,as well as the anthologies Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn and Those Winter Sundays: Female Academics and their Working-Class Parents. A recipient of two Ohio Arts Council Fellowships in Poetry, a Fulbright lectureship in translation, and a Yaddo Fellowship, she currently lives in Lynn, Massachusetts. Her website is http://dianekendig.com.