Chorus

Chia-Chi Yu

Chorus

That rain-strewn night in the woods, the chorus, chorus

Of the green tree frogs called us

And let us by flashlight far from our firelight

Over and down a logging road to the marsh,

And they kept singing as green as the half-frozen

Hemlock branches we brushed slowly among,

As high and thin as the air we tried to hold

As breath among mountains, as thin

And clear as the ice our boots were breaking

Gently, each step a pale-green croaking

Of its own, as we came nearer and nearer where

They had risen out of cold graves to the cold

At the brittle edge of winter broken toward spring

To make their music over a cold spawning,

To choir all night after night, telling each other

We lived at the edge of summer, we live

Here again and again. As we came closer,

The singing ended, suddenly went silent

At a single pulsing throatbeat. Nothing but wind

And sleet made any sound over the marsh.

We turned our light away. We waited longer

And longer in darkness, shivering like the reeds

Beyond us, chilled as the film of ice at our feet,

Forgetting all words, and the first voice began

Again, far off, and slowly the green others

Nearby began their hesitant answers, their answers

Louder and clearer chorused around us

As if we belonged there, as if we belonged to them.

David Wagoner

 

 

 Growing up, spring evenings were full of frog noise from the pond. 

I wish I could hear it now.

 

 

Moth Song

Virgil Elliott



  

Moth Song

I tasted it, the gold

In the gold, I saw the sweetness

At the end of my uncoiling

Tongue, by the beautiful ends

Of what curved from my forehead,

And I swam, gliding, I dove

Through the air toward gold

And sweetness meant to be

Chosen, begging to hold me

And be drawn inside me.

But I stop now, I hang

Still, suddenly suspended

Without having chosen to be

Still in a breeze still full

Of calling and beckoning

Red and blue around gold,

And what comes to meet me

Holds me and turns

My body, spinning a lightness

Around me to fold my wings

Close into a darkness,

And it turns me slowly

Into a flower and drinks me,

And I open, I become

Completely known, I blossom.

David Wagoner

Smoke and moths - we're seeing a lot of both of those these days. Forests burning, moths swarming - it's as if a surfeit, a splurge, a super-abundance has, yes, "blossomed" around us, swirled us within its rhythms, moved us with its influence. Every 10 or so years, when the conditions are just right, the moths come out in great numbers, any window with a light behind it is covered with fluttery moth-bodies, any outside light obliterated with feathered furies. Add to that this misty-musty thickness of smoking forests - it's a strange atmosphere. 

But the poem intrigues me for other reasons as well. This bewildering lure of destruction - what is this? What draws us toward our demise? Why do we dance with death? What is the fascination of fire? I have no answers to this, only questions.

Their Fire

Albert Bierstadt

 

Their Fire

Their fire was small. They fed it only enough

To keep them through the night and to keep them

Together and unafraid

Lying between it and the face of the cliff

Where, at the foot under a hanging stone,

They had made their shelter

For a time, as others had in years so distant

Now, they seemed as thick and soft as the stillness

Standing around their sleep

In which the animals also slept (the beavers

And otters whose doors were deep under the water,

Squirrels in their hollows)

Or walked in the sleep of others (the gray foxes,

The martens and black bears, silent, listening).

Had they too wondered,

Those other makers of fire, how long to linger

In this same place, how many living seasons

It would keep them warm,

Would hold them together at a single hearthstone

While the round year turned the sky, thickened the clouds

Or thinned then, turning

The snow and the rain as it turned the wind, turned leaves

And turned the color of their hair like ermine's fur

And turned the earth?

They held their hands out to that restless fire

As if to shield it, to calm it, and they turned

Their faces to its light.

David Wagoner

I wanted to ignore the circumstances and just have poems. But poetry comes out of what we’re living. And what we’re living is so strange that it’s hard to know what to say or do. But it does feel like each family unit (sometimes that means 1, because 1 is a potential family, and comes from a family, whether blood or water, however fractured or subtracted from) is sitting by its fire, ruminating over the past, wondering about the future. We are self-absorbed at this moment, so I like how this poem brings nature back into the scene. I’m so glad to see for myself the cherry trees blossoming, or the Northern Flickers as they drum loudly on any metal available – the season is Spring and it is expanding and blossoming. It reminds me that we will too. I keep my loved ones close, and turn my face to the light. Warm my hands at the fire. What tomorrow brings is tomorrow’s problem. We’re "together now, and unafraid".

 

Caterpillar Song

The Caterpillar Of Phalaena Pini.

Caterpillar Song

Summer and leaves filled me

With a green drowse, now full

Of sleep I must turn

Leaflike, the fine thread

Comes from my lower lip

And fastens to a leaf, I am

Weaving around my fullness

A closing, a slow shuttling

To touch there and there

Where I will dream

All my hearts withering

And changing to a half-remembered

One in the air who quivers

Among leaves, who will know

Night after night by this

Night I spin around us how

Already it stirs

From sleep inside me, gathers

The leaves I have left

In me, how we begin

Together, it grows huge eyes

For me, and we wait

Behind them, it is growing

Shut wings, we wait between them

Night by night after this

Night spun around us, we know

Now is the time to soften

The way ahead for us, it opens,

The wet, shut wings come slowly

Out, they open, the veins

Fill them, they harden

And belong to us, we see

The night with all our eyes

At once, we move our wings

Apart among leaves, the one

Leaf with eyes to open

The night, not falling now

But rising and flying.

David Wagoner

"There where I will dream." How often do we imagine what it's like to wrap up in a chrysalis and change into a moth? To think of being like a caterpillar, feeding on green, growing, "changing to a half-remembered one" (as if there's a seed of something within, something I once was meant to be, and something from my future drawing me), spinning the Night around me. How the caterpillar feeds on leaves, and in time becomes a leaf-like creature, but one "rising and flying" rather than falling and dying. And the element of night? The unknown, hidden world only dimly grasped, where patterns weave us, in our sleep, in our dreams, into something new.

"Shut wings, we wait between them."

And what will we become?

 

A Guide to the Field

Steven Dempsey

A Guide to the Field

Through this wild pasture, this mile of strewn grasses,
We walk among seedcrowns
Only half-formed at the beginning of summer
But already growing
Heavier with the burden nothing will harvest
But birds and the weather,
Some (this ryegrass) like caterpillars spinning
Cocoons out of sunlight,
And some (this lavender bluegrass) a waist-high forest
Of slender firtrees,
Still others (cheatgrass, wild barley) plotted like flowerbeds
Under flights and counter-flights
Of swallows and field sparrows. Each blade, each spikelet,
Each glume and awn, each slowly
Stiffening stem, no matter what may come
In the next wind - hail or fire -
Will take its beheading, will give up this year's ghost
With less than a murmur,
And we pass beside them now, taking together
Our first strange steps
On a path that leads us down to its end in water.
Each look, the first.
Each touch of our strange fingers, the first again.
Each movement of our bodies
As strangely startling as what the swallows dare
Skimming the pond, their wingtips
Glancing, glancing again, swept-luminous crescents,
Each act of theirs
As if for us only. They show us ways to turn
Into willing lovers
Not needing to say Yes on this day when all questions,
Even before the asking, 
Having mingled with their answers. Remember winter:
Birds gone, seeming lost,
And the grass lying down once more to pretend one death,
Dried pale and brittle
By a hard-earned hard-learned gift of seeming done
With its life. Love dies and love
Is born at the same heartroots in words once cold
And comfortless as a scattering
Of ashes: All flesh is grass meaning Love lies down
Mortal, immortal.

David Wagoner

 "A Guide to the Field" hits so many sweet spots for me: fields, grasses, swallows, "Yes", questions, the Bible - a few of my favourite things right there. And he's put in the names of the parts of grass, too. It seems to me that the naming things is a kind of poetry. Saying that something is or how it is, is a statement of existence, a calling up, a spell, but one of unveiling rather than enchanting. When Wagoner writes, "We walk among seedcrowns" and then proceeds to list the different grasses - ryegrass, lavender bluegrass, cheatgrass, wild barley - and then even more specifically,  their parts - blade, spikelet, glume, awn, stem - it's like conjuring. In my mind I walk through this field, and the grasses rise up to my inward eye, alive in every particular. As Wagoner describes the field, he also seems to describe himself in a kind of self-portrait as a field of grasses over which the birds soar and dive. By quoting the line "All flesh is grass." he can speak so easily of the fleeting beauties of life and the inevitability of death. But this grass death is not final. "Love dies and love is born at the same heartroots..." A new season will resurrect the field. And if that weren't lovely enough, there's the bit about the swallowplay in the sky and over the surface of the water, showing us how all questions have mingled with their answers. His answer, just like e.e. cummings said over and over too, is "Yes". Yes, yes, and Amen.