M Buchinger| Writing Poetry from Within the Natural World 1

Mary Buchinger www.marybuchinger.com Poetry Workshop: Writing Poetry from Within the Natural World San Miguel Writers’ Conference February 2020

Contents Wild Iris ....................................................................................................................................... 2

The Visible World ........................................................................................................................ 3

Parable of the Moss Piglet........................................................................................................... 5

Nature Knows Its Math ............................................................................................................... 6

The Oven Bird ............................................................................................................................. 6

The Tree Agreement ................................................................................................................... 7

Satao ........................................................................................................................................... 7

For a Coming Extinction .............................................................................................................. 8

When the Animals Leave this Place ............................................................................................. 9

The Blue .................................................................................................................................... 12

Hare at Dusk……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………14

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Wild Iris BY LOUISE GLUCK At the end of my suffering there was a door. Hear me out: that which you call death I remember. Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting. Then nothing. The weak sun flickered over the dry surface. It is terrible to survive as consciousness buried in the dark earth. Then it was over: that which you fear, being a soul and unable to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth bending a little. And what I took to be birds darting in low shrubs. You who do not remember passage from the other world I tell you I could speak again: whatever returns from oblivion returns to find a voice: from the center of my life came a great fountain, deep blue shadows on azure seawater.

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The Visible World

BY JORIE GRAHAM I dig my hands into the absolute. The surface breaks into shingled, grassed clusters; lifts. If I press, pick-in with fingers, pluck, I can unfold the loam. It is tender. It is a tender maneuver, hands making and unmaking promises. Diggers, forgetters. . . . A series of successive single instances . . . Frames of reference moving . . . The speed of light, down here, upthrown, in my hands: bacteria, milky roots, pilgrimages of spores, deranged and rippling mosses. What heat is this in me that would thaw time, making bits of instance overlap shovel by shovelful—my present a wind blowing through this culture slogged and clutched-firm with decisions, overridings, opportunities taken? . . . If I look carefully, there in my hand, if I break it apart without crumbling: husks, mossy beginnings and endings, ruffled airy loambits, and the greasy silks of clay crushing the pinerot in . . . Erasure. Tell me something and then take it back. Bring this pellucid moment—here on this page now as on this patch of soil, my property—bring it up to the top and out of sequence. Make it dumb again—won’t you?—what would it take? Leach the humidities out, the things that will insist on making meaning. Parch it. It isn’t hard: just take this shovelful and spread it out, deranged, a vertigo of single clots in full sun and you can, easy, decivilize it, un- hinge it from its plot. Upthrown like this, I think you can eventually abstract it. Do you wish to?

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Disentangled, it grows very very clear. Even the mud, the sticky lemon-colored clay hardens and then yields, crumbs. I can’t say what it is then, but the golden-headed hallucination, mating, forgetting, speckling, inter- locking, will begin to be gone from it and then its glamorous veil of echoes and muddy nostalgias will be gone. If I touch the slender new rootings they show me how large I am, look at these fingers—what a pilot—I touch, I press their slowest electricity. . . . What speed is it at? What speed am I at here, on my knees, as the sun traverses now and just begins to touch my back. What speed where my fingers, under the dark oaks, are suddenly touched, lit up—so white as they move, the ray for a moment on them alone in the small wood. White hands in the black-green glade, opening the muddy cartoon of the present, taking the tiny roots of the moss apart, hired hands, curiosity’s small army, so white in these greens— make your revolution in the invisible temple, make your temple in the invisible revolution—I can’t see the errands you run, hands gleaming for this instant longer like tinfoil at the bottom here of the tall whispering oaks . . . Listen, Boccioni the futurist says a galloping horse has not four legs (it has twenty)—and “at C there is no sequence because there is no time”—and since at lightspeed, etc. (everything is simultaneous): my hands serrated with desires, shoved into these excavated fates —mauve, maroons, gutters of flecking golds— my hands are living in myriad manifestations of light. . . . “All forms of imitation are to be despised.” “All subjects previously used must be discarded.” “At last we shall rush rapidly past objectiveness” . . .

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Oh enslavement, will you take these hands and hold them in for a time longer? Tops of the oaks, do you see my tiny golden hands pushed, up to the wrists, into the present? Star I can’t see in daylight, young, light and airy star— I put the seed in. The beam moves on. Jorie Graham, from The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994. (HarperCollins)

Parable of the Moss Piglet

BY MARY BUCHINGER I am what can happen when most reduced jaws and claws pigment-cup eyes I’m shaped like a barrel and move like a bear my tubular mouth a sucking pharynx armed with stylets I stab the everything I eat indomitable I thrive in fire in ice when very dry I vitrify call me space bear water bear I bear it all orbiting earth or carried in a claw I make the way for predators and prey five extinctions I’ve survived a gray nearly nothing but alive (AGNI)

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Nature Knows Its Math BY JOAN GRAHAM

Divide the year into seasons, four, subtract the snow then add some more green, a bud, a breeze, a whispering behind the trees, and here beneath the rain-scrubbed sky orange poppies multiply. Joan Bransfield Graham, "Nature Knows Its Math" from Marvelous Math.

The Oven Bird BY ROBERT FROST

There is a singer everyone has heard, Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird, Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again. He says that leaves are old and that for flowers Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten. He says the early petal-fall is past When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers On sunny days a moment overcast; And comes that other fall we name the fall. He says the highway dust is over all. The bird would cease and be as other birds But that he knows in singing not to sing. The question that he frames in all but words Is what to make of a diminished thing.

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The Tree Agreement BY ELISE PASCHEN

The neighbor calls the Siberian Elm a “weed” tree, demands we hack it down, says the leaves overwhelm his property, the square backyard. He’s collar-and-tie. A weed tree? Branches screen buildings, subway tracks, his patch of yard. We disagree, claim back the sap, heartwood, wild bark. He declares the tree “hazardous.” We shelter under leaf-hoard, crossway for squirrels, branch house for sparrows, jays. The balcony soaks up the shade. Chatter-song drowns out cars below. Sun branches down. Leaves overwhelm. The tree will stay. We tell him “no.” Root deep through pavement, Elm.

Source: Poetry (January 2016)

Satao BY STEPHEN DERWENT PARTINGTON

Satao, Kenya’s last great tusker, was poached in 2014 Cowards, let us sing in dead Elmolo how the elephants have died. We thank the cavemen, that they drew them, that zoologists described them, for the photos of them herding which the tourists left behind, for who would ever, fools, believe us? Teeth from heaven to the ground!? I stretch my arm out like a trunk to palm the graveyard of its cranium; it’s how, I hear, they mourned. The brain within worked tools and language. I have none: a useless pen (it’s only good for drafting elegies) and even then, no words. We once had tuskers. Tell the birds! Source: Poetry (January 2016)

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For a Coming Extinction BY W. S. MERWIN

Gray whale Now that we are sending you to The End That great god Tell him That we who follow you invented forgiveness And forgive nothing I write as though you could understand And I could say it One must always pretend something Among the dying When you have left the seas nodding on their stalks Empty of you Tell him that we were made On another day The bewilderment will diminish like an echo Winding along your inner mountains Unheard by us And find its way out Leaving behind it the future Dead And ours When you will not see again The whale calves trying the light Consider what you will find in the black garden And its court The sea cows the Great Auks the gorillas The irreplaceable hosts ranged countless And fore-ordaining as stars Our sacrifices Join your word to theirs Tell him That it is we who are important W. S. Merwin, "For a Coming Extinction" from The Lice. (Atheneum Publishers, 1967)

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When the Animals Leave this Place BY ALLISON ADELLE HEDGE COKE

Underneath ice caps, once glacial peaks deer, elk, vixen begin to ascend. Free creatures camouflaged as waves and waves receding far from plains pulling upward slopes and faraway snow dusted mountains. On spotted and clear cut hills robbed of fir, high above wheat tapestried valleys, flood plains up where headwaters reside. Droplets pound, listen. Hoofed and pawed mammals pawing and hoofing themselves up, up. Along rivers dammed by chocolate beavers, trailed by salamanders—mud puppies. Plunging through currents, above concrete and steel man-made barriers these populations of plains, prairies, forests flee in such frenzy, popping splash dance, pillaging cattail zones, lashing lily pads— the breath of life in muddy ponds, still lakes. Liquid beads slide on windshield glass along cracked and shattered pane, spider-like with webs and prisms. “Look, there, the rainbow touched the ground both ends down!” Full arch seven colors showered, heed what Indigenous know, why long ago, they said no one belongs here, surrounding them, that this land was meant to be wet with waters of nearby not fertile to crops and domestic graze. The old ones said, “When the animals leave this place

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the waters will come again. This power is beyond the strength of man. The river will return with its greatest force.” No one can stop her. She was meant to be this way. Snakes in honor, do not intrude. The rainbow tied with red and green like that on petal rose, though only momentarily. Colors disappear like print photographs fade. They mix with charcoal surrounding. A flurry of fowl follow like strands, maidenhair falls, from blackened clouds above swarming inward covering the basin and raising sky. Darkness hangs over the hills appear as black water crests, blackness varying shades. The sun is somewhere farther than the farthest ridge . Main gravel crossroads and back back roads slicken to mud, clay. Turtles creep along rising banks, snapping jowls. Frogs chug throaty songs. The frogs only part of immense choir heralding the downpour, the falling oceans. Over the train trestle, suspension bridge with current so slick everything slides off in sheets. Among rotten stumps in black bass ponds, somewhere catfish reel in fins and crawl, walking whiskers to higher waters. Waters above, below the choir calling it forth. Brightly plumed jays and dull brown-headed cowbirds fly as if hung in one place like pinwheels.

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They dance toward the rain crest, the approaching storm beckoning, inviting, summoning. A single sparrow sings the stroke of rain past the strength of sunlight. The frog chorus sings refrain, melody drumming thunder, evoked by beasts and water creatures wanting their homes. Wanting to return to clearings and streams where ash, or white birch woods rise, tower over, quaking aspen stand against storm shown veils—sheeting rains crossing pasture, meadow, hills, mountain. Sounds erupt. Gathering clouds converge, push, pull, push, pull forcing lightning back and forth shaping windy, sculptured swans, mallard ducks, and giants from stratocumulus media. As if they are a living cloud chamber, As if they exist only in the heavens. Air swells with dampness. It has begun. Allison Adele Hedge Coke, “When Animals Leave This Place” from Blood Run.

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The Blue BY CAMILLE T. DUNGY

One will live to see the Caterpillar rut everything they walk on—seacliff buckwheat cleared, relentless ice plant to replace it, the wild fields bisected by the scenic highway, canyons covered with cul-de-sacs, gas stations, comfortable homes, the whole habitat along this coastal stretch endangered, everything, everyone, everywhere in it danger as well— but now they're logging the one stilling hawk Smith sights, the conspiring grasses' shh shhhh ssh, the coreopsis Mattoni's boot barely spares, and, netted, a solitary blue butterfly. Smith ahead of him chasing the stream, Mattoni wonders if he plans to swim again. Just like that the spell breaks. It's years later, Mattoni lecturing on his struggling butterfly. How fragile. • If his daughter spooled out the fabric she's chosen for her wedding gown, raw taffeta, burled, a bright hued tan, perhaps Mattoni would remember how those dunes looked from a distance, the fabric, balanced between her arms, making valleys in the valley, the fan above her mimicking the breeze. He and his friend loved everything softly undulating under the coyest wind, and the rough truth as they walked through the land's scratch and scrabble and no one was there, then, besides Mattoni and his friend, walking along Dolan's Creek, in that part of California they hated to share. The ocean, a mile or so off, anything but passive so that even there, in the canyon, they sometimes heard it smack and pull well-braced rocks. The breeze, basic: salty, bitter, sour, sweet. Smith trying to identify the scent, tearing leaves of manzanita, yelling: "This is it. Here! This is it!" his hand to his nose, his eyes, having finally seen the source of his pleasure, alive.

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• In the lab, after the accident, he remembered it, the butterfly. How good a swimmer Smith had been, how rough the currents there at Half Moon Bay, his friend alone with reel and rod—Mattoni back at school early that year, his summer finished too soon— then all of them together in the sneaker wave, and before that the ridge, congregations of pinking blossoms, and one of them bowing, scaring up the living, the frail and flighty beast too beautiful to never be pinned, those nights Mattoni worked without his friend, he remembered too. He called the butterfly Smith's Blue. Camille Dungy, "The Blue" from Smith Blue. (Southern Illinois University Press, 2011)

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