[with 4 poems by Jane Mead]
What is Leafy yet has no Leaves?
On our way home Mike and I pull over at Newfound Gap but not for the Appalachian vistas: it’s our last stop to hunt lichens before we leave the Smokies. And maybe an opportunity to spread some lichen joy.
No need to hunt – stop moving long enough and a lichen will find you. Two old guys squinting through magnifying glasses at rocks and bark, though, and it also isn’t long before a passing family asks, “What gives?” “Looking at all the lichens,” Mike answers. “What’s a lichen?” Jackpot! Mike begins to tell their story . . . “a whole little world of fungus and algae” . . . while I wander on.
Now a couple asks me why I’ve raised my camera toward this one tree among the millions. Spreading from its bark are crooked fingers, hands of crones, veined, flattened, beseeching. “That’s lichen?” says the woman when I tell her. “I thought it looked like wind had plastered leaves against the trunk.” Exactly, that’s just how it looks. But it has no leaves!
Lobaria pulmonaria: Lungwort, you need a new name. Not even remotely kin to spiderworts, toothworts, liverworts, you are no wort at all – though your presence is atmosphere’s benediction. Draw deeply, my lungs! Exhale wonder! What shall we call you, Leafy without Leaves? Troll’s Greeting? Across the Aisle? Or maybe simply Lichen Welcome.
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Three Candles
And a Bowerbird
I do not know why
the three candles must sit
before this oval mirror,
but they must. –
I do not know much
about beauty, though
its consequences
are clearly great – even
to the animals:
to the bowerbird
who steals what is blue,
decorates, paints
his house; to the peacock
who loves the otherwise
useless tail of the peacock –
the tail we love.
The feathers we steal.
Perhaps even to the sunflowers
turning in their Fibonacci
spirals the consequences
are great, or to the mathematical
dunes with ripples
in the equation of all things
windswept. Perhaps
mostly, then, to the wind.
Perhaps mostly to the bowerbird.
I cannot say.
But I light the candles: there is
joy in it. And in the mirror
also, there is joy.
Jane Mead (1958-2019)
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These poems by Jane Mead appear in To the Wren: Collected & New Poems (Alice James Books, Farmington ME, © 2019). The book spans three decades of Mead’s life: running her family’s vineyards in Napa Valley; the death of her mother; her own cancer which ultimately took her life. All through her poetry there is a fierce seeking for identity – But always it’s either I or world. / World or I. Relentlessly she seeks justice for the earth, for creatures, for the self. Poet Gerald Stern writes, “Jane Mead’s mission is to rescue—to search and rescue; and the mind, above all, does the work…. Her poems are a beautiful search for liberation and rebirth.” Nature is not something we write about; nature is what we are.
[Above poem excerpt by Jane Mead is from In Need of a World.
Three bright yellow lichens of the Smokies found at Newfound Gap:
= Xanthomendoza weberi
= Caloplaca falvovirescens, “Colonel Mustard”
= Caloplaca flavocitrina, “Continental Firecrackers”
++++ – – Species identification revised 2/28/2022 after review by Dr. Lendemer]
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The Argument Against Us
The line of a man’s neck, bent
over welding, torchlight breaking
shadows on his face, hands cracked
into a parched map of fields he has woken –
the gods wanted us.
Think of their patient preparation:
the creature who left the rocking waves behind,
crawling up on some beach, the sun
suddenly becoming clear. Small thing
abandoning water for air, crooked body
not quite fit for either world, but the one
that finally made it. Think of all the others.
Much later, spine uncurls, jaw pulls back, brow-bone
recedes, and as day breaks over the dry plain
a rebellious boy takes an upright step
where primitive birds are shrieking above him.
He did it for nothing. He did it
against all odds. Bone of wrist, twist
of tooth, angel of atoms – an infinity
of courage sorted into fact
against the shining backdrop of the world.
The line of one man’s neck, bent –
torchlight breaking shadows on his face.
There was a creature who left the waves behind
and a naked child on a windy plain:
when the atom rips out into our only world
and we’re carried away on a wave of hot wind
I will love them no less: they are just how much
the gods wanted us.
Jane Mead (1958-2019)
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The Geese
slicing this frozen sky know
where they are going –
and want to get there.
Their call, both strange
and familiar, calls
to the strange and familiar
heart, and the landscape
become the landscape
of being, which becomes
the bright silos and snowy
fields over which the nuanced
and muscular geese are calling.
Jane Mead (1958-2019)
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To the Wren, No Difference
No Difference to the Jay
I came a long
way to believe
in the blue jay
and I did not cheat
anyone. I
came a long way –
through complexities
of bird-sound and calendar
to believe in nothing
before I believed
in the jay.
Jane Mead (1958-2019)
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When Mike Barnett and I stopped at Newfound Gap (on US 441 smack in the middle of Great Smoky Mountains National Park) we were returning from the weekend lichens course at Tremont, part of the Southern Appalachian Naturalist Certification Program. We bow down in gratitude to John DiDiego, Education Director at Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont, for convincing Dr. James Lendemer to teach this course. Dr. Lendemer is chief lichenologist at New York Botanical Gardens and literally wrote the book: Field Guide to the Lichens of Great Smoky Mountains National Park (which weighs 1.48 kg, not so much a “field guide” as an entire encyclopedia!).
Dr. Lendemer in his book names L. pulmonaria “Crown Jewel of America” – it is the biggest baddest lichen of them all. Thank you, James – we love lichens! Thank you GSMIT and SANCP and GSMNP. And thanks to all you little fungal hyphae, algal photobionts, cyanobacteria – you look mah-velous.
Resources:
More by and about Jane Mead at Poetry Foundation.
Field Guide to the Lichens of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Erin A. Tripp and James C. Lendemer, University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville, © 2020.
Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont, Southern Appalachian Naturalist Certification Program.
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V E R S E ❦ I M A G E 