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How can a poem make a difference? How can a tree make a difference? Perhaps the answer to those questions is that poetry and nature have a way of simply reminding us that we are not alone.
“Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.” Going to the woods, or simply noticing the small defiant ways nature is thriving all around me on a daily basis, helps me feel that communion.
As Robin Wall Kimmerer wrote in Braiding Sweetgrass, “All flourishing is mutual.”
As I stared at the trail map, I saw the friendly little red arrow that pointed to where I was on the map, its caption: You Are Here. It seemed not only to serve as a locator, but as a reminder that I was living right now, breathing in the woods, that there was life around me, that the natural world was right here and I was a part of it; I was nature too.
That day, I walked the waterfalls, where water runs clear and cold through the soft hills. I was totally alone and each time my brain wanted to reach toward something awful—I was reminded that I was here. I repeated, you are here, you are here. And you are too. We are here, together in this moment, crucial and urgent, yes, but also full of wonder and awe at every turn.
Here, poems serve as a witnessing as much as they do incantations. If in order to have one tree flourish, we must plant more around it, the same must go for poems. The words collected here—in this small forest of poetry—were made specifically for this anthology,
there is more time to plant trees, to write poems, to not just be in wonder at this planet, but to offer something back to it, to offer something back together. Because nature is not a place to visit. Nature is who we are.
Even as the great abstractions come to take you away, the regrets, the distractions, you can at any second come back to the world to which you belong, the world you never left, won’t ever leave, cells forever, forever going through their changes, as they have been since you were less than anything, simple information born inside your own mother’s newborn body, itself made from the stuff your grandmother carried within hers
the phone booth the ghost snare of a gray whale’s call;
Down the road the dandelions bloom in a garden of stone. A garland of souls.
You have more rights than the undocumented: I need a permit to uproot you.
My mother is my favorite immigrant. After her? The sonnet.
Foxes hurry down sidewalks as if they are late for a meeting, counting their steps, a number which will legitimize their presence on the planet. No wonder their smiles are self-satisfied.
Nature cannot be redeemed. It is your wish to redeem it, to set things right. It is the impossibility of redemption. It is the lover walking out, their self-justified gait as they disappear through the tunnel of flowers.
In Alaska, my life was with me again, attached for now. I took photos of the birds to remind myself that the unsettled feeling wasn’t caused by me, and could be solved by traveling somewhere cold.
A library in every hollow. And birds. So many birds we stop trying to name them. We’ll just let them be with their own names. Maybe they’ll tell us.
All is well, say the midges, dragonflies, moths, ladybugs, even the wind stirring the leaves says to trust instinct’s music. I walk to unravel panic’s thousand fingers braided through my insides—false roots. When I see death I think lose lose lose automatically. The tarot says let go, change. I haven’t read Gospodinov’s The Physics of Sorrow, yet; can only take Sharpe’s In the Wake in small doses. I don’t want to drown in ocean math. I narrow my eyes to the scam, don’t move too fast, switch directions then pause—turn back to see what choice the snake makes sans my alarm. In the forest, grief
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I was here to investigate my place among them, these giants, 3000 years old, still here, living in my lifetime. I should have felt small, a mere human—petty in my clumsy boots, burrs in my socks, while these trees held a glossary of stars in their crowns, their heads up there in the croissant-shaped clouds, the wisdom of the ages flowing up through from root to branchlet— though rather I felt large inside my life, the sum of Jung’s archetypes: the self, the shadow, the anima, the persona of my personhood fully recognized and finally accepted, the nugget of my being, my shadow of plush light. I
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every place i have loved has forced me to leave.
small steps, like prayers— each one a hope exhaled into the trees.
Rain has eaten 1/4 of me yet I believe against all evidence these raindrops are my letters of recommendation here is a man worth falling on.
Write down something that doesn’t have to matter, that still matters, to you.
The moth has no Wednesdays.
Love and dread are brethren
the dark rain veil making a bride of the mountain.
What do you mean the wind is not alive? Look at the way it courts the shy juniper. Can’t you see its reliable visits every afternoon? Its secure attachment style to its own wet and thunderous passions? Let’s go be alive like that, like rattlesnakes making a cursive communion on the road at night. They say it’s the heat trapped in the asphalt that draws them but I know it’s the way the stars ambush their loneliness with their communities of fire, the waning moon glowing like a hypothesis, the snakes curling their bodies into a yes.
invisible but for its hunger which is another word for desire if desperation were off the table & all that remained were two open arms waiting
“Vividness is Self-Selecting,”
Orlando, are we even allowing ourselves the present moment anymore? There are still two blankets that sit on either side. Reimagining can take place at the root of time, out of all necessity we convert the elements as a matter of course.
I am learning that shifting through ailments, in particular, is how to make peace with anything happening at any moment, and that moving in and out of tricky comfort zones is a kind of subtle reckoning with mortality.
We work through the panic into insight.
There is first Milwaukee then Tacoma then Silverdale, with its view of the Dyes Inlet to which you wanted to move back.
On Keats’ poem, a critic writes that “lyric is thus a mode that simultaneously erases and expresses selfhood.” I think of an eraser and a pencil working alongside each other.
Part of me can’t help but think Keats called the birdsong “immortal” because of his poem and not the Romantic idea that nature, through its cycles and turns, will ebb and flow forever. Sometimes the ego’s optimism remains beautiful even when it’s utterly and completely flawed. I’d rather think of Keats, sketching himself back into place.
That stretch of coast like the soft spot in your self, the heart of your self I call your soul. That feeling that comes there, when fog settles so truly I know I am walking inside a cloud. Intangible. Tangible. Both at once.
Even on these hot days, far from the cool coast of California, when I’m with you, I am inside such a cloud. This is how I know I won’t ever believe in heaven if heaven isn’t right here, with you.
That, dear heart, is it. It is the softness I need to thank you for. I’d be lost without that part of you that eases up enough to let me in. Then closes back around me.
like the female sea otter in Santa Cruz accosting surfers, committing longboard larceny. The otter was shredding, caught a couple of nice waves, said a sixteen-year-old dude whose board was commandeered by the otter at Cowell’s Beach.
Resistance is struggle against impossible circumstance, refusal, the will to survive in the face of annihilation; it can also be the surviving remnant enacting revenge.
Below the willows while they wept, the sun swept its faceless face down the edge of the river. Ducklings tailed the twilight light, vanishing quickly, toward the horizon where, it seemed, even truth and beauty vanished.
I’ve begun to believe the present, like the shadows on the water, twisting, doesn’t have to be a form the past took. The past has taken so much. Must there be more to give, to give back, to get on, or away, from this? My memory moored me. Lifting, now, my cup to yours, my eyes to yours in the light cast by the dark, I don’t know if I can be known like that. Fresh snow. Clouds of smoke. Flight without wings. Tower. Kings demanding another story. Another dawn, sleepless, donning another little death. Hooves of death I couldn’t stop for running through me until I was run through, laid like a
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the sun today is an alarmingly dull shade of orange, a well-cut circle of marigold construction paper in a pale rust sky.
I suddenly wished she had felt less comfortable with me as she launched into a tirade about how black magic is real, and how witches are cursing Christians at their gatherings, and obviously you can’t grab someone by the shoulders on an airplane and scream YOU ARE WHY THE WORLD IS ON FIRE,
It is her fault the world is on fire, isn’t it? Her and people like her, people who vote for lies because it’s more fun than the truth. People more excited to burn everything down in righteous rage and pious anger than to do the hard work of figuring out what’s really wrong and then trying to fix it? Why was I polite when the world is on fire? If the sun has turned to murky amber wasn’t it my job to tell her she’s a monster?
The French have a name for when you think of the thing you should have said: L’esprit d’escaliar— roughly “staircase wit”—named for the moment on the stairs as you leave the building when you think of the thing you should have said
Is it as simple as anger being easier than grief? And oh my God, are you as exhausted as I am from grieving the planet? Tell me what I’m supposed to say about the end of the world. Tell me how not to be hysterical every time I see what’s coming. Every time I see what’s here. Tell me how to accept that it didn’t have to be this way but that it is. Tell me how to accept this sun, this fire, this sky, this day. Don’t leave me here in these ashes. Tell me to go inside. Tell me not to stare at the sun. Tell me it’s OK to be alone. Tell me it’s OK to be scared. Tell me it’s OK to be grief stricken.
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And then the day came, when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. —ANAÏS NIN
You’re more than when you were just a whimpering mistake beneath the dirt, the Camellia clawing for first breath. Risk that breathlessness. Risk day, risk slap of sun, risk yawning wide, risk the itch and choke of it, the damned wheel of days, growth and all the dirty water it took. Then be that quaint explosive. Growl out with howling, red vibrato, and own everything weather has done to you. Bellow, girl. Blossom.
