DEVON MARSH

DEVON MARSH ON “IN THE REDWOODS”

When our children were growing up, my wife and I made it a point to take our family to places of remarkable natural beauty. We wanted to instill in the kids a sense of wonder. Starting when they were small, we visited sites close to home in the Appalachian Mountains and on the North Carolina coast. As they grew, we ventured farther afield: desert trails in Redrock Canyon; tidal pools at Point Lobos; complex surface geology in Acadia; an immense deposit of driftwood on a stretch of beach in the Olympic Peninsula. Our family has been fortunate to see some beautiful places. In each one, we tried to slow down and take in the unique features it had to offer.

My poem, “In the Redwoods,” recounts a visit with my teenage children to California’s Big Basin State Park. The park burned in August, 2020. Although many of the largest trees survived the fire, reading the poem now inflicts a poignancy I couldn’t have anticipated when I wrote it. I wrote the poem because our walk along the trails in Big Basin felt different from other hikes. Surrounded by the ancient redwood trees, I found myself wondering how many tourists these patient giants had observed. Trees feel our presence, if not in a sentient way then at least through our effect on their surroundings. But it’s possible they register more than we think they do. Trees communicate through sophisticated chemical mechanisms, using both airborne and mycorrhizal connections. We might discover that their capacity for cognition approaches their ability at communication. What did the redwoods perceive about me and my family? What did they tell each other after we left?

In a poem published last summer, I wrote, “Through us, the universe reflects.” I believe humans are the universe’s attempt to reflect on itself. Similarly, human creations—works of art, legends, myths—are Homo sapiens’ attempt to reflect on ourselves. None of the mythical creatures in our imaginations lurk in shadows observing us, but our knowledge of them asserts their presence as a possibility. We’ve each felt hair stand up on the back of the neck. The sense that someone is watching us is hard to shake. It might arise from a primitive awareness that in fact someone is watching us. Or it might arise from the natural world itself regarding us with a critical eye; it has every justification to observe us with suspicion. Or it might arise from our own creations observing us from inside our minds and forming their own opinions.

As I suggest in “In the Redwoods,” a Sasquatch family watching us walk through the forest would wonder how humans have managed to achieve all we have. They would puzzle over how we as a species have exercised dominion to the point of ruin, putting them and ourselves in peril, when by all appearances we are ill-equipped for survival. The sense that I was watched in this way stayed with me in the redwoods. The perception felt like a gift, and our hike that day felt like a poem.

Wendy Weiger

Wendy Weiger on “Death of a Catbird”

In my writing, I explore my relationship with the natural world.  I try to capture the essence of emotional and spiritual experiences I seek in outdoor wanderings. Living in northern Maine, I’m blessed with endless opportunities for hiking, paddling, and snowshoeing. Even when life gets hectic, I carve out time to roam the woods and waters.  In every excursion, I find nourishment for my senses and soul.

However, the most deeply moving experiences can’t be scheduled. If I work at my computer for much of the week, then head into the woods for a couple of days off, I won’t always check “have a profound experience” off my inner to-do list. Meaningful encounters happen at unexpected times, in unlikely places, often when things don’t go as planned.

The events I describe in “Death of a Catbird” unfolded in my yard, over the course of several days when I was involved with ordinary, routine affairs.  Shortly thereafter, I went on a solo backpacking trek into Baxter State Park, a wilderness preserve in the heart of the Maine Woods. For three nights, I was the only human on Wassataquoik Lake, an expanse of cold, clear water surrounded by rugged granite mountains. My mind was free from the constraints of required tasks and the distractions of electronic media. My thoughts kept returning to the dead catbird and its bereaved mate, and the narrative I present here began to take shape.

It may seem ironic that in such a magnificent natural setting – home to more elusive avian species – my thoughts would dwell on humble backyard feeder birds. But the catbirds reminded me that the wild is not limited to remote places far from our everyday lives. Even in towns and cities, the wild is around us, though we often fail to notice it. Our neighbors include creatures who, though they are not human, are fellow beings nonetheless. That understanding makes my world feel richer, more alive.

Writing this piece helped me work through some of my own feelings of bereavement.  In the five years preceding the catbird’s window strike, multiple members of my community died. The losses included my mother, as well as a dearly beloved friend who had been a steadfast support during my mother’s final illness and beyond. I didn’t fully realize the extent to which I was still in mourning. My empathy for the dead catbird’s mate released feelings I had suppressed in my desire to move forward with my life. My lingering grief and loneliness welled up from a dark place deep inside me and flowed into the light, where healing could begin.

I’m grateful for what I learned from my catbird neighbors. I’m sorry it came as the result of death and loss on their part. My hope is that, by sharing my experience, I will pass the gifts I received from them on to others.

Lana Hechtman Ayers

Lana Hechtman Ayers on “Thirteen Ways of Looking at the White Moth at My Window”

Growing up in harrowing circumstances with an abusive parent, books became a very early refuge. In stories, I could escape into adventurous and exciting worlds that offered happy endings. But in poems, I recognized a different kind of sanctuary. The poets whose work I read had faced all kinds of adversity and not only survived it, but thrived to tell about it. Across time and distance, culture and gender, poems reached out to me and inspired hope I could survive my situation as well. So, from the time I could hold a crayon, I began responding to the poems I read with scribbles of my own experiences. It would be a very long time, not until after I completed an MFA at the age of 42, that I would take  my own poetry seriously enough to try submitting it to literary journals. But that early inclination of being in conversation with other poets’ poems has never left me. 

I love the notion of a poem as the beginning of a relationship, a way to express and reveal personal truths. Poems that make me feel, remember, imagine, discover something about myself or the world, or teach me something new, call to me to pen a response of my own. Sometimes, I respond with a poem of my own that in form or content bears very little similarity to the inspiration poem.  Other times, I’ll take a phrase or line from the original poem and use it as epigraph or the first line of my work. In my poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at the White Moth at My Window,” inspired by Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” I borrow the structure and form of the original poem entirely. With a poem as rich as Stevens’s, I have had more than one conversation. In addition to the white moth, I have looked at my pen, my little black dog, and a Steller’s Jay in thirteen ways. 

Each time I compose a response poem to another poet’s work, despite being separated by time, distance, gender, culture, religion, or any of the ways people feel distant from one another, I feel part of the community of all poets, connected through our love of language, imagery, and artful expression.

Celia Bland

Celia Bland on “Under the Porch”

My grandmother and I always went to Coin Laundry near 3 Guys Grocery where they passed the savings on to us.  There were wire buggies for wheeling wet to dryers.  There was a sign: Don’t Dye On Us. A bakery next door made antebellum birthday cakes.  A white plastic woman was slotted into a white cake, her breasts and shoulders iced and the cake below this sweet bodice became a hoop skirt, ruffled and beribboned in different colors of spun sugar.  You could blow out the candles.  You could slice your way to her naked legs and tiny high heeled feet.  

This one time, I was fourteen.  I’d slotted quarters into the dryer and I looked around for the dog.  Why did I never have a leash for her?  Not even a length of rope.  She must have slipped through the glass door when someone came in with their baskets while I was flopping wet clothes into the porthole. I searched up past Hardee’s and down near the gas pumps and found her under another dog – stuck, impaled—in the front yard of a brick house. Is that house torn down now?  Did each individual brick explode in humiliation? The man of the house stood on his porch and laughed as I tried pulling my dog from his dog’s swollen member.  

But there was nothing to do but wait. 

Nine weeks later she slipped under our porch to give birth in the dark on dank clay.  I’d laid a faded towel over cardboard under a table in the living room, but bitches hide when whelping or dying.  I thought of that dog years later when I lay naked on a thin rectangle of paper under spotlights magnified by the OR’s glossy tiles.  Masked professionals in dull white gowns moved with purpose and instruments, or stood at the ready, waiting.  I think my poem “Under the Porch” gives some sense of the distance between my desire to retain a modicum of dignity and theirs to see some action between my stirruped legs.  What seems to be the problem?  I should have screamed and bit them, crawled under the table on my hands and knees, and bucked that baby out of me. 

But of course, I did not.