V E R S E and I M A G E

Edges fall first,

silt grains cemented

under thousands of years

sloughed away by wind, rain,

footstep of dog,

sandstone alchemized beneath

weight of mountain

turns sand again

Subtle rubbing of days shapens us anew,

weathering, the

slowest song of change

No wonder we wake up some days

wondering at who we used to be.

No wonder we don’t always notice

as our outer edges strip away.

No wonder the children build castles

made of sand at water’s edge,

even though the castles fall.

They are practicing for

when they too will feel

what once seemed enduring

slip inside the rising tide.

from What We Were Born For, Blue Light Press, San Francisco CA. © 2021. Reprinted by permission of the author.

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Geology never intended to trip us up. A mountain’s day is steady and measured, calm as the drip of water, languid as the North Pole’s precession that turns to aim the spinning globe at heaven. All night the mountain’s flow, her stretch, recumbent but restless; at first light she yawns and shudders, her turn and crouch and slow rise; then all morning’s long knotting and gathering to her full height; her relentless stride; a forceful journey, this full day’s labor into evening even as her form, still imposing, diminishes and she reclines.

Did the mountain even feel the pinprick of water seeping and freezing in minute fissures at her neck? Perhaps a vague itch as lichens scratch to enlarge their circumference, little acid fingernails, a thimbleful of soil. Windborne seeds – would she notice such a light caress when one descends, then its rootlets, its swelling cambium and lignin? One and now another trunk emerges from the crevice, breathing, drinking sunlight, and here comes the day in mammal-time when gravity prevails. A crack, thunder without lightning, slabs and chunks release and roll downslope until they hold at a narrow rib where it crosses below the mountain’s shoulder. Bedrock settled into the new bed it has found.

Ten thousand human-years pass until you and I puff into view. We slow our pace to climb over and around. Here embedded in the footpath is a softer stratum that has been polished to ebony by a thousand boots. Here alongside the trail we greet the rounder edges and pitted face of earliest falls, sharper clefts and angles  from falls a mountain-day later. Water proving its strength. Lichens still hard at work. Wait a while and this path will open. Geology never intended to trip us up. She simply hopes that we will slow our frantic climbing. Pause here with her for a moment. Look, and simply see.

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Basalt, granite, tourmaline, the male wash

of off-white seed from an elderberry,

the fly’s-eye, pincushion nubbins yellow

balsamroot extrudes from hot spring soil,

confetti of eggshell on a shelf of stone.

Here’s a flotilla of beaver-peeled branches,

a cottonwood mile the shade of your skin.

Every day I bring some small offering

from my morning walk along the river:

something steel, blackened amber with rust,

an odd pin or busing shed by the train

or torqued loose from the track, a mashed penny,

the buddy bulge of snowmelt current.

I lie headlong on a bed of rocks,

dip my cheek in the shallows,

and see the water mid-channel three feet

above my eyes. Overhead the swallows

loop for hornets, stinkbugs, black flies and bees,

gone grass shows a snakeskin shed last summer.

The year’s first flowers are always yellow,

dogtooth violet dangling downcast ans small.

Here is fennel, witches’ broom and bunchgrass,

an ancient horseshoe nailed to a cottonwood

and halfway swallowed in it spunky flesh.

Here is an agate polished over years,

a few bones picked clean and gnawed by mice.

Her is every beautiful rock I’ve seen

in my life, here is my breath still singing

from a reedy flute, here the river

telling my blood your name without end.

Take the sky and wear it, take the moon’s skid

over waves, that monthly jewel.

If there are wounds in this world no love heals,

then the things I haul up – feather and bone,

tonnage of stone and the pale green trumpets

of stump lichens – are ounce by ounce

a weight to counterbalance your doubts.

In another month there won’t be room left

on the windowsills and cluttered shelves,

and still you’ll see me, standing before you,

presenting some husk or rusty souvenir,

anything the river gives, and I believe

you will love.

from The Ecopoetry Anthology, edited by Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street, Trinity University Press, San Antonio, TX. © 2020

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“Find yourself a stone, one you can pick up and carry,” our instructor tells us. “Then find me bedrock.” All weekend Elizabeth will be offering us something new every few minutes  – strange vocabulary, stranger stories in deep time, paths upward toward heath balds and downward into the past – but first she offers these two commands. Our substratum. We will build everything upon a stone from the Middle Prong of the Little River, edges knocked round, compressed bits of texture a hundred shades of gray (soon we’ll know to call those bits clasts); and ponderous gray stone rising beside the river, its layers, its planes and fissures (soon we’ll know which is bedding and which foliation). Here we begin our weekend course in the Smokies, 500 million years beneath our feet, asking how it all got here.

I’m taking my final elective offered by Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont in their Southern Appalachian Naturalist Certification Program – Geology of the Smokies. This is the first time Linda has accompanied me to Tremont, so she’s taking her first course. We know from our readings that these are the most folded, tortured, elevated/eroded/re-elevated/re-eroded square miles in North America. We know that for the next 48 hours we’ll be continuously outdoors except a few hours to eat and sleep. From my previous nine courses, I know Elizabeth Davis as an excellent teacher, patient yet challenging. What we don’t yet fully know is just how truly challenging, physically and intellectually, this weekend is going to be. But here we are on Friday night and we should be getting a clue – Elizabeth is leading us on a hike into pitch darkness, across the shallows on a single-log bridge, and has turned us loose on an island to find our river stones.

Success. No one falls into the river.

Tomorrow morning we’ll be picking our way up through a pathless boulder field to a massive outcrop of Thunderhead Sandstone (its compressed sediment, clasts, recycled from the Grenville mountains built almost a billion years ago). We’ll spend the afternoon literally on hands and knees beneath laurel and rhododendron, climbing to a heath bald summit where some really cool rocks are exposed and where we’ll take samples of the low pH soil. Sunday morning we’ll hike a trail so hazardous that the Park won’t even include it on their maps, but along the way we’ll cross major and minor fault lines to discover their rocky transitions, investigate geology’s effect on plant communities, devise some crazy poems and songs about our findings, and end up at beautiful Spruce Flat Falls.

Late Sunday night, after driving five hours, Linda and I will pull into our driveway and our old bones will creak as we lug our gear back into the house in pitch darkness. At least we don’t have to cross a log bridge to make it to the kitchen door, but when we wake in the morning, stiff and aching, will Linda have a few choice cusswords for me after dragging her along on this adventure? Oh yeah, we’re sore, but only in body. What Linda does have for me is a list of books I need to order. And this proclamation: “You know, after this weekend I really love Geology!”

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With wash and ripple and with wave,

Slow moving up the long deserted sand,

The little moon went watching the white tide

Flood in and over, spread above the land,

Flood the low marshes, make a silver cover

Where the green sea-weed in a floating mist

Creeps under branch and over.

The wide water spreads, the night goes up the sky,

The era ends.

Tomorrow comes warm blood with a new race,

Warm hearts that ache for lovers and for friends,

And the pitiful grace

Of young defeated heads.

Tomorrow comes the sun, color and flush

And anguish. Now let the water wash

OUt of the evening sky the lingering reds,

And spread its coolness higher than the heart

Of every silver bush.

Night circles round the sky. The era ends.

“Look,” said God;

And with slow fingers

Drew away the mantle rock.

Man followed groping

To touch the flesh of his true mother;

And, standing in great valleys,

He saw the ages passing.

I found a little ancient fern

Closed in a reddish shale concretion,

As neatly and ans charmingly shut in

As my grandmother’s face in a daguerreotype,

In a round apricot velvet case.

Janet Loxley Lewis (1899-1998)

from Poetry Magazine, No. 111, The Poetry Foundation. © June, 1920

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Emilie Lygren has published poems and anthologies and developed dozens of publications focused on outdoor science education. Her first collection of poems, What We Were Born For, was selected by the Young People’s Poet Laureate as the Poetry Foundation’s monthly book pick for February 2022.

Robert Wrigley has said that “poetry can have a redemptive function. It can look at the chaos you see and make a kind of sense of the smallest part of it.” His poems are concerned with rural Western landscapes and humankind’s place within the natural world.

Janet Loxley Lewis (1899-1998) wrote novels, stories, and librettos, but she considered poetry the superior form. Theodore Roethke describes her poetry as “marked by an absolute integrity of spirit and often by the finality in phrasing that can accompany such integrity.”

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