So Little Time : An Interpretive Look at What it Means to be Green in an Evolving World 9780989310475, 9780989310468

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So Little Time Words and Images for a World in Climate Crisis

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Greg Delanty

& other poets and photographers Foreword by John Elder Envoy by Bill McKibben

green writers press

Brattleboro, Vermont

So Little Time © 2014 by Green Writers Press All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Green Writers Press is a Vermont-based publisher whose mission is to spread a message of hope and renewal through the words and images we publish. Throughout we will adhere to our commitment to preserving and protecting the natural resources of the earth. To that end, a percentage of our proceeds will be donated to the environmental activist group, 350.org. For information about the paper and printing of this book, see the Colophon. Giving Voice to Writers Who Will Make the World a Better Place Green Writers Press | Brattleboro, Vermont www.greenwriterspress.com Permissions to use the poems printed throughout the book appear on page 202. isbn e-book: 97 8-0-9893104-7-5

half-title photo by steven brock frontispiece by neil louie

Contents Publisher’s Note Foreword by John Elder Proem by Greg Delanty

vii ix xiii The Shrinking World Greg Delanty xvii Life Is Risky Grace Paley 2 The Well Rising William Stafford 3 The Farmer Ellen Bryant Voigt 4 Ostraka Greg Delanty 5 Foraging Honey-Bees Thomas McCarthy 6 Woodchucks Maxine Kumin 7 The First Story Greg Delanty 8 Speaking Plainly Greg Delanty 9 Loosestrife Greg Delanty 10 Small Jeremiad Sydney Lea 11 The Drift Maurice Riordan 13 Trees of Knowledge Michael Coffey 13 In Blackwater Woods Mary Oliver 14 The Cows at Night Hayden Carruth 17 Patient Greg Delanty 18 Responsibility Grace Paley 21 The River at Wolf Jean Valentine 22 A Hunger So Honed Tracy K. Smith 23 Insomnia Andrew McNeillie 24 Disarming Greg Delanty 25 Binsey Poplars Gerard Manley Hopkins 26 Danby Forest Gail Holst-Warhaft 27 Petal Drop Ross Thurber 27 Saint Francis and the Sow Galway Kinnell 29 Salvage Didi Jackson 30 Bristlecone Fred Marchant 31 Picking Stone Leland Kinsey 32 The Crow Adrie Kusserow 35 Ocean City Caitlin Doyle 36 Unnamable Greg Delanty 37 Too Early for Grackles Sydney Lea 38



Pathetic Fallacy Major Jackson 39 Fire and Ice Robert Frost 41 Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey William Wordsworth 43 The Natural World Greg Delanty 46 Marshall Washer Hayden Carruth 48 Höfn Seamus Heaney 52 Bears at Raspberry Time Hayden Carruth 54 All Rise David Cavanagh 55 from A Midsummer Night’s Dream 56 Il Dodo, Il Kiwi Antonello Borra 58 Instructions to a Seed David Curzon 59 News Grace Paley 60 What Kind of Times Are These Adrienne Rich 61 Mother Greg Delanty 62 Buried Treasure Gail Holst-Warhaft 66 Fossil David Curzon 67 Postcard for a Painting Wyn Cooper 67 Pied Beauty Gerard Manley Hopkins 69 Of Multitude Eamonn Wall 70 Artillera Ken Hebson 71 How Knowledge Happens / Comeback with Swans Eamon Grennan 72 Fall Light Leland Kinsey 73 Earth-Sparrow Galway Kinnell 76 For the Last Catamount Ralph Culver 77 For the Record Greg Delanty 80 Consumption Jay Parini 81 The New Pastoralists Greg Delanty 83 Seeking Rest Ellen McCulloch-Lovell 85 After Su Tung P’o Ellen McCulloch-Lovell 85 Vermont is the New Florida Julia Alvarez 86 Harvest Marjorie Ryerson 88 From Woody’s Restaurant Greg Delanty 89 Traffic Rachel Trousdale 90 s o

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Bike Politic David Cavanagh Ode to Mt. Philo Major Jackson The Second Coming William Butler Yeats Jar of Effulgence Greg Delanty Postcard Recipe from Hunting Season Wyn Cooper Record Rainfalls Buff Lindau Indian Boy Love Song #1 Sherman Alexie Snow Day Billy Collins High Winds Flare Up and the Old House Shudders Ellen Bryant Voigt Sugarloaf Lesle Lewis Savor Verandah Porche Blackberry Eating Galway Kinnell The Other Greg Delanty First Question Fred Marchant Daybreak Galway Kinnell On the Amtrak from Boston to New York City Sherman Alexie The Skunk Moths Greg Delanty Rogue Moss David Barber The Heron Liam Ó Muirthile from The End of British Farming

Paul McLoughlin

Country Relish Liam Ó Muirthile The Birds Greg Delanty The Bird David Ferry Gifts of Rain Seamus Heaney On Reading the Diaries of Christopher Columbus Greg Delanty Earth Tearer Greg Delanty Black Snow Greg Delanty Global Warming Jane Hirshfield In the Next Galaxy Ruth Stone The Alien Greg Delanty Winter Green David Cavanagh O’Brien’s Cove / Mayflies Barry Sternlieb Names for Birds Stephen Sandy Ur God Greg Delanty Some Effects of Global Warming in Addison County Jay Parini In A Kitchen Where Mushrooms Were Washed Jane Hirshfield At the Sap Wells Chard DeNiord The Refusal John Engels Waves in the Woods, song Carpenter/Porche

91 92 93 94 96 96 97 98 101 102 103 103 104 104 105 108 110 113 114 115 117 118 119 120 122 125 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140

For the Taking Sophie Cabot Black October David Ferry Clothespins Robert Bly from the Third Georgic of Virgil David Ferry International Call Greg Delanty Like the Small Hole by the Path-Side Something Lives In Jane Hirshfield A Wake On Lake Champlain Greg Delanty Veil George Kalogeris Ode to the Beekeeper Ross Gay Student Poems from Greg Delanty Driving Home at Night David Budbill The Traveller’s Grace Greg Delanty Nothing Gold Can Stay Robert Frost The End of Football Gary Margolis Street Sweeper Kathryn Maris Appreciation Greg Delanty Leaping Falls Galway Kinnell Clear Cut Daniel Tobin The Expedition Daniel Tobin White Worry Greg Delanty Signs Grace Paley Wonder of Wonders Greg Delanty Oil Spillage Greg Delanty The Harrowing Sophie Cabot Black The Drummers Bernard O’Donoghue Canticle of the Sun, a Secular Take

Greg Delanty

Prelude Christine Casson Farm Aid Eamonn Wall Turbulence / Carrot Benjamin Aleshire A Quiet Afternoon Charles Simic White Out Greg Delanty Resistance Sharon Webster Et In Arcadia EGo Gerry Murphy Eucalyptus John F. Deane Written on the Margin of Saint Gall’s ms, 904 ad Greg Delanty Even the Athiests Sang for the Solace of Song Greg Delanty The Ship of Birth Greg Delanty Monarch Butterfly Greg Delanty

Envoy by Bill McKibben Contributors Acknowledgements List of Photographs

142 143 143 145 146 147 148 149 150 152 155 157 158 159 161 162 164 166 167 169 169 170 173 175 176 177 178 179 181 182 183 184 186 187 188 189 191 192 195 196 202 204

Publisher’s Note I will take with me the emptiness of my hands What you do not have you find everywhere —W.S. Merwin

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had just started my publishing company, Green Writers Press, and had in mind to publish a book of poetry and images that would become a donation series for 350.org., the organization

founded by Bill McKibben. Bill has long been a personal hero of mine, and I am an active member in

the Vermont flagship chapter of 350. The phrase “so little time” stayed in my mind like an urgent refrain, as I went about my days planning the book.

I contacted Bill to see if he was interested in the book as a fundraiser. After I spoke with Bill and

received an enthusiastic “Yes,” I began to read some of his writings in the hope of selecting certain quotes to use throughout the book.

I came across a quote of Bill’s from Wandering Home: A Long Walk Across America’s Most Hopeful Landscape:

Vermont’s Champlain Valley and New York’s Adirondacks ending with the phrase “so little time.” Unbeknownst

to me, Bill had already used this term in his writing, or perhaps I had subliminally remembered it—either way, it resonated with me, but I needed a poet to make it come alive.

I contacted Bill, and again, he straightaway suggested the poetry of Greg Delanty, a vibrant poet and

professor active in 350-Vermont. Originally it was going to be a book of Delanty’s poetry with images

from Vermont photographers. Greg suggested that we invite other living poets and photographers, and subsequently Greg invited many here, some not within the confines of the state of Vermont.

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The generous and talented artists within its pages have been fueled by the desire to participate in a book

that lends itself to the cause of raising awareness for global climate change and is printed in Vermont on recycled paper.

John Elder agreed to write a Foreword, which is eloquent in this regard, and Greg Delanty’s poetry

served as catalyst—lovers of photography and poetry will no doubt be a part of it, too, for it is our intention to build a community of readers around the book and raise awareness for the plight of the earth. Never has the time been so urgent for all of us to act together to stop global warming.

Dede Cummings, editor/publisher

green writers pre ss, november 18, 2013

Photographer, Elizabeth Ungerleider, and Dede Cummings survey the damage from Hurricane Irene along Route 14 near Royalton, Vermont on September 24, 2011 after 350.org’s “Moving Planet” day of global action.

amelia hancock

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Foreword by John Elder o

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hrough its disrup tion of seasonal patterns, climate change throws off the co-evolved

rhythms of pollinators and flowering plants, as has become evident both along our country roads and in our gardens. It hinders the regeneration of the sugar maples and hemlocks that have for so

long clothed the slopes surrounding villages here in Vermont and made them feel like home. In the larger map to which we in this state also belong, the alarming acidification of the sea and the growing frequency

and ferocity of hurricanes register Earth’s steadily increasing temperatures. Rising water levels threaten the very survival of fragile human communities in coastal regions around the world.

One aspect of the present crisis is clearly technological. There is a growing realization, fostered by

organizations like 350.org, that we need to shift away as swiftly as possible from reliance on fossil fuels. This

will require much greater dedication to conservation coupled with development of renewable energy. But as writers like Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson testified decades ago, the misalignments of our science and technology are symptoms, not causes; ours is ultimately a cultural crisis. In his book Enough, Bill McKibben

relates it to the inability of societies and individuals in the affluent West and the Pacific Rim alike to govern our own destructive appetites for more, more, more.

Where can we discover the capacity for new self-restraint that is required of us so urgently? A deeper

sense of affiliation with the natural world offers one avenue away from the selfish and unsatisfying culture

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of consumerism. It is a term that derives from the Latin word for “adoption,” and that also holds within it

the shared root for “son” and “daughter.” In short, affiliation implies a familial, rather than an economic or

individualistic, sense of our place in the world. It suggests a loving relationship informed by attentiveness, sympathy, and practical concern.

Many of the poems by Greg Delanty and others that are collected here call to mind vivid journal

entries—observations and reflections grounded in experiences of what the philosopher David Abram calls

“the more than human world.” So too, many of the luminous photographs and the evocative passages of prose that are also included suggest moments of unforeseen but indelible connection with nature. Such responses do not represent escapes from our pressing ecological challenges. Delanty’s poem “A Shrinking

World” describes the song of the brown thrasher as “four different notes: one grieves, another/frets, a third prays, but a fourth celebrates.” The voices in this book establish a comparable range of tones—sometimes shattered, sometimes joyful, sometimes both.

A writer’s sense of affiliation with local landscapes and the global processes they exemplify does not

imply sentimentally ascribing human feelings or meanings to nature. Rather, it is a habit of continually touching base with the weather, an alertness to the stages of forest succession and the movements of birds

and animals among the trees. Thoreau called his personal practice of monitoring the woods, waters, and fields

around Concord his “morning work.” Though nature may not speak with a human voice, the possibility of intimacy with it nevertheless arises from the daily dialogue between observation and imagination.

In Robert Frost’s poem “Tree at My Window,” the speaker gazes into the canopy of a mature hardwood

tree that rises just outside his room on the second story of a farmhouse. He feels a mysterious connection

between its “thousand light tongues” surging back and forth in the wind and the gusts that shake his

tempestuous mind: “Your head so much concerned with outer, /Mine with inner, weather.” Outer and inner, science and poetry—the wholeness and vigor of our own responses to this stormy era will depend upon

embracing such apparent contradictions. We will gain the necessary resolution to curb our appetites and rein in our technology only when we identify ourselves more completely with the trees growing beside us and the sky over our roof.

Poetry both catalyzes and distills our human potential for affiliation with the world. It is, like the

extravaganza of evolution itself, a process of ceaseless embodiment. Through combining sensual details so

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fine they seem to have been observed through a botanist’s hand-lens with the vaulting reach of figurative

language, it reveals that the whole world is always here, around us and within us. The activating power of poetry resides equally in its living body of sound. Repetitive cadences, forests of consonants and the vowels that echo over them like coyote song at moonrise in the Green Mountains— poetry’s gathering, incantatory

force can quicken our pulses and our breath. It can prompt us to stand up from our chairs and walk out the door, back into a familial world that has been waiting for us.

mariana cook



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“One summer day, while I was walking along the country road on the farm where I was born, a section of the stone wall opposite me, and not more than three or four yards distant, suddenly fell down. Amid the general stillness and

immobility around me, the effect was quite startling . . . It was the sudden summing up of half a century or more of atomic changes in the wall. A grain or two of sand yielded to the pressure of long years, and gravity did the rest.” —Joh n B ur r o ug h s q uot ed b y bil l Mc Kibben from The End of Nature (2006)

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t is established now that there is little time left for so many plants and creatures, including

ourselves, if we go on living as we do. Many have already run out of time. We are turning the planet into a place where we cannot live as a species, or if we do manage to survive, we will live in diminished ways. Yet

the government, and the world in general, continues on as if this is not so. In part this is because we cannot bear to dwell on our dire situation, which results in apathy and denial. Phyllis Windle, in her important article “The Ecology of Grief,” writes about the shock we feel at realizing our situation, and suggests ways we can tackle it. Good art works on many powerful levels, one of which can help us come to terms with our

emotions and thoughts: our shock, fear, anger, and loss. It is important that we face our situation and suffer it so we can live in the world in a healthier way. Windle says, “Our mourning rituals could celebrate, too, and

affirm our faith in the processes of ecology and evolution. We could note the remaining beauty of the earth, the birth of new species or subspecies, and the grand rhythms of the biogeochemical cycles.” This is what So Little Time is very much about.

All my own poems included here were written over a period of twenty-five years. Many have appeared

in other collections. They seem like different poems when they are placed in this new context. They were written while I was writing other poems arising out of whatever was preoccupying me at the time—whether

it was my parents, love, marriage, the birth of my son, or baseball. Since I have also always been preoccupied

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with what is going on in the world, naturally I wrote poems out of my public concerns, though I never think of them as either public or private. Maybe the only thing that makes a poem public is that it is published for the public to read. What is important for the poet is that the poems work as art, that they are not

overwhelmed by the artist on the soap box. It is only when the art issues from what is genuine, that the work is truthful and nourishing. Even the darkest art lifts the spirit. It releases something trapped in us so that we can breathe more easily. The word “spirit” derives from the Latin Spiritus which means “breath.” I hope you

breathe easier after reading this book, which is dark often, but it is trying to modestly connect us all under the skin of difference, to show us our place in this world.

Originally, as Dede has said in her Publisher’s Note, Bill McKibben suggested that the book be made

up of photographs set around my own poems. When the project was put to me, I suggested that it would be

a more powerful book if the work of other poets were included. I invited many poets in this book. I believe that poetry can make things happen. W.H. Auden’s “poetry makes nothing happen” is often quoted (though

somewhat out of context since it is taken from a poem written within months of the Second World War,

which is what Auden, it can be argued, is referring to). The quote is from the poem “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” and must also be responding to Yeats’ fear stated in his poem “Man and the Echo”: “Did that play of

mine send out/Certain men the English shot?” In any case, the Auden quote is wrong in the most obvious

way as it provided work for the compositors/printers who produced that book with Auden’s own poems, which in turn provided money to feed themselves and their families.

A life dedicated to poetry would be empty if it didn’t act upon the truth of its beliefs. For me the time

for remaining in the ivory tower of academia and the arts, places of knowledge and privilege, is long past. For over thirty years I have been what people call ‘an activist,’ standing in vigils and demonstrations weekly, and taking part in civil disobedience. Art and life are not separate. I think of them more as a palindrome. This is my way of being alive.

As Windle tells us, the important thing is to acknowledge our situation, mourn it, and celebrate it. We

can celebrate it by acting, whether it is in what we do in our personal lives, such as biking instead of using the car, recycling, or by publicly saying no to the fossil fuel industry and supporting healthier ways of supplying energy. Grace Paley tells us that “The only recognizable feature of hope is action.” We should act not just

for our planet’s future but for the quality of our own lives. I tell students that if they act then their own lives will be so much the richer, and they can enjoy their chocolate, beer or wine all the more (and not use them xiv

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to shut out their fears and become addicted to them). I can testify myself that my nightly glass of wine or beer tastes all the better for my actions. So think of yourself, how you can enjoy your life better by becoming

active in making our planet a place we can all live in. ‘To ignore our predicament/isn’t on’ is a slightly altered quote from a poem written by the Cork poet, Seán Ó Ríordáin, who wrote in Gaelic, and which I will finish with, or rather begin with:

A pat h y I s O u t There’s not a fly, moth, bee, man, or woman created by God whose welfare’s not our responsibility; to ignore their predicament isn’t on. There’s not a madman in The Valley of the Mad who we shouldn’t sit with and keep company, since he’s sick in the head on our behalf. There’s not a place, stream or bush, however remote; or a flagstone north, south, east nor west that we shouldn’t consider without affection and empathy. No matter how far South Africa, no matter how distant the moon, they’re part of us by right: there’s not a single spot anywhere we’re not a part of. We issue from everywhere. Translated by Greg Delanty

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Th e S h r i n k i n g Wo r l d

to Mary & Niall on Catherine’s first summer

Reading how the European long-tailed tit builds a perfect domed nest, gathering lichen for camouflage, feathers to line it and cobwebs as binding so the nest can stretch while chicks grow, I thought of you rushing to crying Catherine, as if her mouth shone like those of finchlings guiding parents through darkness. If only chainsaw-armed men, felling whole forests by the minute, could have seen you hover around your fledgling, they would have immediately cut engines and listened to your lullabying. But their lumbering motors drone on in the distance and perhaps approach us. And what about all those other Catherines, imperial woodpeckers & birds of paradise? I sing now like the North American brown thrasher, who at one point in its song orchestrates four different notes: one grieves, another frets, a third prays, but a fourth celebrates.

—greg delanty

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I think people who don’t know the woods very well sometimes imagine

it as a kind of undifferentiated mass of greenery, an endless continuation of the wall of trees they see lining the road. And I think they wonder

how it could hold anyone’s interest for very long, being all so much the same. But in truth I have a list of a hundred places in my own town I

haven’t been yet. Quaking bogs to walk on; ponds I’ve never seen in the fall (I’ve seen them in the summer—but that’s a different pond). That list

gets longer every year, the more I learn, and doubtless it will grow until the day I die. So many glades; so little time.

— b il l mc kib b en from Wandering Home: A Long Walk Across America’s Most Hopeful Landscape: Vermont’s Champlain Valley and New York’s Adirondacks St. Martin’s Griffin (2014)

Life Is Risky Life is as risky as it is branchy treetop and twigtip are only the beginning then comes the westwind to lean and the northwind to turn then the sunshine implores and up all of us go we are like any greengrowing machinery riding the daylight route —grace pale y

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Th e We l l R i s i n g The well rising without sound, the spring on a hillside, the plowshare brimming through deep ground everywhere in the field— The sharp swallows in their swerve flaring and hesitating hunting for the final curve coming closer and closer— The swallow heart from wingbeat to wingbeat counseling decision, decision: thunderous examples. I place my feet with care in such a world. —william stafford



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Th e Fa r m e r In the still-blistering late afternoon, like currying a horse the rake circled the meadow, the cut grass ridging behind it. This summer, if the weather held, he’d risk a second harvest after years of reinvesting, leaving fallow. These fields were why he farmed— he walked the fenceline like a man in love. The animals were merely what he needed: cattle and pigs; chickens for a while; a drayhorse, saddle horses he was paid to pasture— an endless stupid round of animals, one of them always hungry, sick, lost, calving or farrowing, or waiting slaughter. When the field began dissolving in the dusk, he carried feed down to the knoll, its clump of pines, gate, trough, lick, chute and two gray hives; leaned into the Jersey’s side as the galvanized bucket filled with milk; released the cow and turned to the bees. He’d taken honey before without protection.

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This time, they could smell something in his sweat—fatigue? impatience, although he was a stubborn, patient man? Suddenly, like flame, they were swarming over him. He rolled in the dirt, manure and stiff hoof-prints, started back up the path, rolled in the fresh hay— refused to run, which would have pumped the venom through him faster—passed the oaks at the yard ‘s edge, rolled in the yard, reached the kitchen, and when he tore off his clothes crushed bees dropped from him like scabs. For a week he lay in the darkened bedroom. The doctor stopped by twice a day— the hundred stings “enough to kill an ox, enough to kill a younger man.” What saved him were the years of smaller doses— like minor disappointments, instructive poison, something he could use.

—ellen bryant voigt

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Ostraka …shards of pottery that the voting public in Athens used to write their vote on.

The eight winds blow, an earthquake shakes Mount Olympus, cholera ravages the states, drought everywhere, the mysterious death of bees throughout the country, the flowers and crops die, the daily slaughtering of innocents, and all we do is debate in the assembly, cast ostraka—shards of democracy— regarding our ships, the color of their sails. —greg delanty

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Fo r a g i n g H o n e y - B e e s Such stories brought home by the foraging honey-bee: the world Is too corporate now, the nitrogen-rich call-centre has growth Fatigue, greenish scum covers the breath in hayfield and stream. Listen now, the stars are beginning to tell us their stories too; The very-far stars, that is, signals picked up, no doubt, By the faltering bee-hives in Ned Lonergan’s farm. Only this Very morning we were astonished to hear of the vacant hive, The second one, where the bees had left without giving notice; The hive, now, become a little apartment block of cells for rent. I thought of the clever ones in the European Space Centre And how they’ve just picked up a new celestial music, A signal with a watery cadence from a distant sister Earth. Twenty light years from Lonergans, Cappoquin, a bee-hive In a planet that is dedicated to peace has just received Its exhausted colonists: bees that heard, long before astro-physics, Of fields far away, of dandelions, clean rivers, white Dutch clover.

—thomas mccarthy

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Wo o d c h u c k s Gassing the woodchucks didn’t turn out right. The knockout bomb from the Feed and Grain Exchange was featured as merciful, quick at the bone and the case we had against them was airtight, both exits shoehorned shut with puddingstone, but they had a sub-sub-basement out of range. Next morning they turned up again, no worse for the cyanide than we for our cigarettes and state-store Scotch, all of us up to scratch. They brought down the marigolds as a matter of course and then took over the vegetable patch nipping the broccoli shoots, beheading the carrots. The food from our mouths, I said, righteously thrilling to the feel of the .22, the bullets’ neat noses. I, a lapsed pacifist fallen from grace puffed with Darwinian pieties for killing, now drew a bead on the little woodchuck’s face. He died down in the everbearing roses. Ten minutes later I dropped the mother. She flipflopped in the air and fell, her needle teeth still hooked in a leaf of early Swiss chard. Another baby next. O one-two-three the murderer inside me rose up hard, the hawkeye killer came on stage forthwith. There’s one chuck left. Old wily fellow, he keeps me cocked and ready day after day after day. All night I hunt his humped-up form. I dream I sight along the barrel in my sleep. If only they’d all consented to die unseen gassed underground the quiet Nazi way. —maxine kumin

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Th e F i r s t S t o r y The email, telling a friend we’re not too bad considering the state of the world, crosses the Atlantic with the touch of a key. The leaves of an evergreen blow like a shoal of emerald fish returning to the same place. A cardinal in his glory pecks the feeder. The bells of the Angelus ring from St Joseph’s, the Angel of the Lord declares unto Mary. The infant god of my childhood is back on earth again, the one I’ve ceased to believe in, the lifebelt that keeps believers afloat in the storm of being here, issuing tickets to the hereafter ever since that episode in the garden, the tall tale of our banishment concocted by some storyteller who’d be so flummoxed we’ve taken it for gospel he’d simply say: “Look around you now. Behold, the garden.”

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What sets wilderness apart in the modern day is not that it’s dangerous (it’s almost certainly safer than any town or road) or that it’s solitary (you can, so they say, be alone in a crowded room) or full of exotic animals (there are more at the zoo). It’s that five miles out in the woods you can’t buy anything. —bill mckibben from The Age of Missing Information Random House (2006)

S p e a k i n g P l a i n ly So few care in comparison to the many that it might as well be no one. The sun glaring through the Cyclops’ eye of the atmosphere wipes out frogs, whips up hurricanes, melts behemoth bergs. Forget that spin of how even one person or creature can alter the world, that a butterfly flapping its wings or a leaping toad can set off a wonder-chain. For myriads now, too late. —greg delanty

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Loosestrife You have become your name, carried on sheep, spurting from ballast, a cure brought across the deep to treat wounds, soothe trouble. There have been others like you, the rhododendron, the cattails that you in turn overrun. Voices praise your magenta spread, your ability to propagate by seed, by stem, by root and how you adjust to light, to soil, spreading your glory across the earth even as you kill by boat, by air, by land all before you: the hardy iris, the rare orchids, the spawning ground of fish. You’ll overtake the earth and destroy even yourself. Ah, our loosestrife, purple plague, beautiful us. —greg delanty

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Small Jeremiad I killed a catbird once when I was young. I’ll claim to this day I didn’t really mean to, Just noticed him and flung a thoughtless stone. I’ve done much worse, so why would this live on? My cracked LP is Mulligan Meets Getz. I killed a catbird once when I was young but why, awake at dawn, should I have turned from husky saxes chanting “That Old Feeling” to some poor bird at whom I flung a stone? There seems reason enough: a catbird dropped to our lawn As I chose my old-fashioned record, a rare bird here in northern New England, and though I’ve cast no stone, I’m sunk in lamentation. Things I have done. Ones I have left undone. And that old feeling…. I killed a catbird once when I was young. My life’s the only life I’ll ever own. I own it all when memory flies in. I killed a catbird once when I was young. I noticed him and flung a thoughtless stone. —sydne y lea



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Th e D r i f t A wet night shelters the eels: they slip downstream through drenched grass; cross meadows, ditches; coil into pools. As a child I stoned one, stilled it—a thing recalled this night entering again your otherness; and a troupe of frogs jumping like clowns across a road, sequined in the cone of a headlight; sliced or crushed in their caper through the farms; eels seeking the Sargasso, melting into ocean, cheated by continental drift: a luminous mime, we drop below the moon; each self in an envelope of wet plumbing sleep…. Amphibious shapes converge

—maurice riordan

Tr e e s o f K n o w l e d g e It’s all about the trees, then– bare, budding, in bloom, there they are.

into the rigid branches for a scratch. They laugh,

Older than the people who walk beneath them, or destined to be

since God knows that trees know Man has been forgiven

taller, deeper, more broad. And out there all night. When the birds sleep, or not,

for all his sins. That was the plan: His Son died

when the sky opens or winks, we don’t know what trees do

on a tree but we don’t get it. Their laughter is silent

or would. God is there, if God there is, draping His hair down

and long with joy. We are free but don’t condone it. This is the knowledge, Look! It’s all about the trees now.

—michael coffe y



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Look, the trees are turning their own bodies into pillars

in my lifetime leads back to this: the fires and the black river of loss whose other side

of light, are giving off the rich fragrance of cinnamon and fulfillment,

is salvation, whose meaning none of us will ever know. To live in this world

the long tapers of cattails are bursting and floating away over the blue shoulders

you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it

of the ponds, and every pond, no matter what its name is, is

against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.

nameless now. Every year everything I have ever learned

—mary oliver

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Th e C o w s at N i g h t The moon was like a full cup tonight, too heavy, and sank in the mist soon after dark, leaving for light

and beautiful faces in the dark, and I counted them—forty near and far in the pasture,

faint stars and the silver leaves of milkweed beside the road, gleaming before my car.

turning to me, sad and beautiful like girls very long ago who were innocent, and sad

Yet I like driving at night in summer and in Vermont: the brown road through the mist

because they were innocent, and beautiful because they were sad. I switched off my light.

of mountain-dark, among farms so quiet, and the roadside willows opening out where I saw

But I did not want to go, not yet, nor knew what to do if I should stay, for how

the cows. Always a shock to remember them there, those great breathings close in the dark.

in that great darkness could I explain anything, anything at all. I stood by the fence. And then

I stopped, and took my flashlight to the pasture fence. They turned to me where they lay, sad

very gently it began to rain.



—hayden carruth

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Pat i e n t The snow has melted clean off the mountain. It’s winter still. Yet another indication that Gaia is in trouble, that things aren’t sound. The rocky mountain top shines like the bald head of a woman after chemo who wills herself out of her hospital bed to take in the trees, the squirrels, the commotion in the town, sip beer in a dive, smile at the child staring at her shining head, wishing it didn’t take all this dying to love life. —greg delanty

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When you are in accord with nature, nature will yield its bounty. This is something that is coming up in our own consciousness now, with the ecology movement, recognizing that by violating the environment in which we are living, we are really cutting off the energy and source of our own living. And it’s this sense of accord, so that living properly in relation to what has to be done in this world one fosters the vitality of the environment. —joseph campbell

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Responsibility It is the responsibility of society to let the poet be a poet It is the responsibility of the poet to be a woman It is the responsibility of the poet to stand on street corners giving out poems and beautifully written leaflets also leaflets you can hardly bear to look at because of the screaming rhetoric It is the responsibility of the poet to be lazy to hang out and prophesy It is the responsibility of the poet not to pay war taxes It is the responsibility of the poet to go in and out of ivory towers and two-room apartments on Avenue C and buckwheat fields and army camps It is the responsibility of the male poet to be a woman It is the responsibility of the female poet to be a woman It is the poet’s responsibility to speak truth to power as the Quakers say It is the poet’s responsibility to learn the truth from the Powerless It is the responsibility of the poet to say many times: there is no freedom without justice and this means economic justice and love justice It is the responsibility of the poet to sing this in all the original and traditional tunes of singing and telling poems It is the responsibility of the poet to listen to gossip and pass it on in the way storytellers decant the story of life There is no freedom without fear and bravery there is no freedom unless earth and air and water continue and children also continue It is the responsibility of the poet to be a woman to keep an eye on this world and cry out like Cassandra, but be listened to this time. —grace pale y

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Th e R i v e r at Wo l f Coming east we left the animals pelican beaver osprey muskrat and snake their hair and skin and feathers their eyes in the dark: red and green. Your finger drawing my mouth. Blessed are they who remember that what they now have they once longed for. A day a year ago last summer God filled me with himself, like gold, inside, deeper inside than marrow. This close to God this close to you: walking into the river at Wolf with the animals. The snake’s green skin, lit from inside. Our second life. —jean valentine

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A Hunger So Honed Driving home late through town He woke me for a deer in the road, The light smudge of it fragile in the distance,

We want so much, When perhaps we live best In the spaces between loves,

Free in a way that made me ashamed for our flesh— His hand on my hand, even the weight Of our voices not speaking.

That unconscious roving, The heart its own rough animal. Unfettered.

I watched a long time And a long time after we were too far to see, Told myself I still saw it nosing the shrubs,

The second time, There were two that faced us a moment The way deer will in their Greek perfection,

All phantom and shadow, so silent It must have seemed I hadn’t wakened, But passed into a deeper, more cogent state—

As though we were just some offering The night had delivered. They disappeared between two houses,

The mind a dark city, a disappearing, A handkerchief Swallowed by a fist.

And we drove on, our own limbs, Our need for one another Greedy, weak.

I thought of the animal’s mouth And the hunger entrusted it. A hunger So honed the green leaves merely maintain it.



—tracy k. smith

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Insomnia Insomniac, the night itself, out there for company, Where tanker constellations ride in the bay: Waiting for the price of crude to rise, waiting For the pilot, lit-up like Christmas trees, A beauty not their own but the gazer’s longing. Someone out there keeping watch like me Looks ashore at the ribbons of street lights, The dock’s fire of arc-lamps, over the hill, A ghost of hotel fronts and flash of tidemark, Waiting for the trader to call. While the night Revels home to urban music on a beer-can, Shark-violence kicking-off down backstreets. The country nearby of deeper shadow folds Into itself and sleeps through mere flotsam In starry thistle field and hedgerow, On moorland and hill, time out of mind— Oblivious as the BBC goes ‘Sailing By . . .’ And wide-awake I lie, listening in the dark To the ‘World Service’, with its breezy talk, And bad news, abroad where the lost tune-in To paper-thin word from imperial London And the world goes on warring, blundering, Cavorting out of control like the sea Beyond hearing in the pounding surf. samantha.perrelli

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—andrew mcneillie t i m e

Disarming

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A middle-aged woman—plain you might say—bikes by our house. I was out of sorts, not long up, but her serene smile, without saying a word, remarks: “Take in the sun on the lake, the honeysuckle’s pink fingers bursting into yellow flames, the traffic for once on North Avenue gone so quiet you can hear the whirr of the hummingbird’s wings reversing in midair.” On another morning such serenity would have vexed me, but there is something so natural about her demeanor. She doesn’t notice me. Disarmed, I let what bothers me go and think since there’s no corresponding god —the pantheon being all tiresome piss and vinegar— we must create a new order and call her Tranquilia, Calmes, or promote Halcyon and tell Aphrodite, Ares, Artemis, even Zeus, to move over in the pecking order, set her smack in the middle, the woman who breezes by our house this divine morning. —greg delanty

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B i n s e y Po p l a r s felled 1879 My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled, Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun, All felled, felled, are all felled; Of a fresh and following folded rank Not spared, not one That dandled a sandalled Shadow that swam or sank On meadow & river & wind-wandering weed-winding bank. O if we but knew what we do When we delve or hew — Hack and rack the growing green! Since country is so tender To touch, her being só slender, That, like this sleek and seeing ball But a prick will make no eye at all, Where we, even where we mean To mend her we end her, When we hew or delve: After-comers cannot guess the beauty been. Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve Strokes of havoc unselve The sweet especial scene, Rural scene, a rural scene, Sweet especial rural scene. 26

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—gerard manle y hopkins

Da n b y Fo r e s t In the cathedral of my non-belief the columns are a shade of pink unseen even in Florence. Planted half a century ago their ranks thinned by storms, their symmetry still holds. Seen close, the marbled trunks are grey and rose like winter sunrise, farther off

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a russet red. The foliage begins thirty feet up, deep green in sun,

The genius of spring is amnesty from falling.

black in shade. We whisper here. To whoever is responsible for the rosy pines in their rows

Funeral Pyres by the river, bonfires on the moor, even gravity is losing a foothold.

I give thanks. —gail holst-warhaft

Spirits return to green aching grass and never even touch the ground. —ross thurber



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S a i n t Fr a n c i s a n d t h e S o w The bud stands for all things, even for those things that don’t flower, for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing; though sometimes it is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness, to put a hand on its brow of the flower and retell it in words and in touch it is lovely until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing; as Saint Francis put his hand on the creased forehead of the sow, and told her in words and in touch blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow began remembering all down her thick length, from the earthen snout all the way through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail, from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine down through the great broken heart to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them: the long, perfect loveliness of sow. —galway kinnell



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S a lva g e Summer camps just outside our door and all along the shore of Lake Champlain. The great blue heron wades thigh high and looks back over its tucked wing at the steps of this lazy season. Everybody knows it is the sun who leads us to rename the stars each night. An infant is born inside the fence of the earth as long-legged mosquitos assemble, emboldened by the day’s heat. I am trying to figure it out: last week, last year: the small bleached finch’s skull near the water’s edge, a modest bowl of bone, shell-like. So many others scattered: whitelip snail, black sandshell mussel, but there is no muscle, no wing, no flight. Eyes hollowed as if emptied by a sculptor’s drill. Feather’s elsewhere. Gone, too, is the song. —didi jackson

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Bristlecone Sometimes a tree will be there when you need it most, when you realize that you’ve been breathing too long in the high, thinned out air. Maybe you’ve staggered, tripped on a rock you warned yourself about, but tripped on anyway. Marmots may be signaling your coming, and you could answer with your own set of clicks and whistles, but all this would only deepen the dizziness, the spin of nausea, the dread combining with delight at reaching the rim of the canyon. Below, the rock shapes waver, and you are not the first to think they look like the dead. You want to run after them, to tug and plead. The feeling as it rises has its own strong winds. You know that lightning and rain will be coming. You stand in one of the eroded places seeking out that tree. —fred marchant

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Picking Stone for Jeff

Fifteen acres of upturned soil, heavily scattered with stones, that my cousin plowed to plant this fall, before his diagnosis of cancer kept him from the necessary clearing, lay before us. I and other family volunteered for a farm’s worst work, to scrabble over that tillage picking the rocks, from fist-sized to those too heavy to lift, so planting and reaping machinery would survive. We would too, but faced a hot south wind that dried the clayey soil to dust and swirled it into devils that clogged our noses and coated our tongues and throats. We could not drink enough and knew the next day we would know the all-body ache that dry hard work makes.

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and pinches and raps between stones. Those we couldn’t lift we slid onto the stone boats, and lugged plenty almost too big to make our loads, dumped at a field-edge embankment that began to look like an abandoned weather-dumped wall made of stone barely stone, like shale and mudstone; through those forms laid down, sunk and melted; to that from the mantle, long cooled and heavy as the day. I also knew some one of us likely picked a rock from the moon, or Mars, or a leftover bit from the Solar System’s swirling creation, some stony meteorite, or carbonaceous chondrite that likely bore water and acids as precursors to life. One might notice the black surface, pitted nature, or peculiar weight, and still not recognize what one had in hand. No ceremony then or now, work bracketed by beginnings and endings. My cousin is well enough to plant the field for cropping next spring, but he will not live

to cut it for green chop, and knows it. If only we could reverse it, the burning up to falling dust. Last winter wild turkeys came out of the woods regularly to feed in his bunker silo. He poached several, said it seemed fair, he and the flock providing each other easy meals. “They don’t need to pick grit for their gizzards to grind silage, and the meat’s so tender.” He hopes to invite us to such a meal this early winter. As I left, he acknowledged my father’s past push to extend tillage on upland hardscrabble while my uncle’s land laid that much closer to the good soil laid down in the beds of ice age lakes, “Well, I know you must love me, I never thought I’d see you pick stone again.” Little enough burden. —leland kinse y s o

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Here is a statistic that does matter: Three quarters of Americans believe the Bible teaches that “God helps those who help themselves.” That is, three out of four Americans believe that this über-American idea, a notion at the core of our cur-

rent individualist politics and culture, which was in fact uttered by Ben Franklin, actually appears in Holy Scripture. The thing is, not only is Franklin’s wisdom not

biblical; it’s counter-biblical. Few ideas could be further from the gospel message, with its radical summons to love of neighbor. On this essential matter, most

Americans—most American Christians—are simply wrong, as if 75 percent of American scientists believed that Newton proved gravity causes apples to fly up. — Bi l l

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from The Bill McKibben Reader: Pieces from an Active Life Henry Holt & Company (2008)

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Th e C r o w I saw a crow once, pecking at the wild ferment of our compost, a frenzy of black wing and beak, squawk and relish, bouncing across the soggy geography. It looked up, as if guilty, gulping down something orange and nubile. Nectar flecked across its throat, it kept pumping its brittle wings, nervous but euphoric dancing almost, over the ripe warm pile, digging its claws into the juicy terrain. And suddenly I knew how war must feel on the earth’s beleaguered back, the constant pecking, the restless itching armies, the wince and smart, gush and heave of old arguments dug up as the earth lunges through blue space, overripe tomatoes seeping down its back as it holds its place in the orbit, hoping someday to shake it all off, like a dog after a swim, the humans smattering like droplets into the galaxy, evolution a bit surprised, but adjusting itself politely and beginning the long haul once more.

—adrie kusserow

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Ocean City There was never an ocean without the other, the one that hid its starfish from us and the one the boardwalk laid out on gift shop shelves, starfish splayed at the level of our eyes. And salt water taffy—what shore did it wash up on? Named for the ocean, tasting nothing like it. The sea was never sweet, a child or two each summer taken by the undertow. We chewed until our teeth stuck together and my brother lost a filling. It gleamed in the taffy like a silver pearl. Always an ocean inside an ocean. We listened for the waves the shopkeeper promised, conch shell pressed to our ears. When they pulled the boy’s body from the wavepool below the water slide, the other ocean stormed. The boardwalk closed early. “Because of the weather,” my mother told us, “because of the boy,” somebody whispered, “because of the waves,” the conch shell said, and the boardwalk was open again by dinnertime. —caitlin doyle 36

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Unnamable More and more we sense it, the old looming terror children wake out of, sobbing, mumbling about being adrift in an ocean of waves, no one able to see the other in the daymare breaking over our heads, the hoar breakers erasing our cries, each head bobbing foolishly, gasping save us, save us. —greg delanty

To o E a r ly f o r G r a c k l e s I’m up alone in an August dawn. There’s already a milky haze on the mountains here in full summer—too early for grackles to covey, the way they do come autumn. They follow the warmth that makes its way down south whenever it’s got a mind. But if it’s only sentimental idiocy to ascribe some mind to migrant birds, it’s more so still to find motive under the imminent chill. Mine is the mind behind such mindless ideas, which hardly deserve applause. I’m here. I’m perched at a window and stare outside at a square of earth, that’s all. It’s green, and aging. Every bird in that untimely swarm is fearful and vigilant, but for a few fleet instants when it nods and pecks—too sadly fearful— at whatever’s left in exhausted grass: grasshoppers? beetles? earwigs? ants? Men and women and birds get born and live and die. Still they strategize: in whatever souls they may have they have some dim faith they’ll always survive, as strange and untrue a thing to believe as any in nature. But that’s no matter. We humans stay alert, we believe, 38

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holding our vigils, as if it’s no matter that the larger world keeps right on spinning and after us all will go on spinning. The birds’ supply of food is waning, but what can they fear will prey on them now? The skunk, the snake, the rat and owl are back in their holes. A month ago, there was that Cooper’s hawk, but I shot above and below him to scare him off, and did it so often that I’m convinced at last my persistence scared him off. I haven’t seen him in days and days. How rare, such success. Hot weather stays, so it must be too early for what I’ve seen, which can bring to mind black windows’ rime, or cruel-edged icicles poised on the eaves above, as if each had a mind like some grim raptor to fall on us all— mother and father and daughters here who only mean to hold to this green, to ripened corn, to small hours here where remnant light is bright as the birds are dark that darken our summer earth. —sydne y lea

Pat h e t i c Fa l l a c y Jog through this suburb at a blue hour when bliss blows over dewy lawns and neighbors walk suspicious dogs inhaling trunks of oaks and birch like a posse of pet detectives, and roused yet cautious, the first mourning dove sings. Ponder your existence, which someday will no longer animate the world of creatures and aviaries. Could your limbs survive without always naming the flawless cathedrals of leaf-branches entwining above your head? Isn’t this what you meant by truly living? Do you believe it?

When did you begin to speak, you who love the grace of a fireplace, its morning ash the aftermath of a desperate battle? You, too, were trying to recover the myth of Philomela in your own time, in your own district, in a tenement built for the wounded and discontent. Those early days you lived in shadows, speechless from what you could not name, yet its absence ever present and growing in a field peopled by your metaphoric propositions. You turn onto Circle Drive—a dragonfly inspects the dark city of your head.

Did you mistreat the vowels?



—major jackson

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Fire and Ice Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I’ve tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice.

—robert frost

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...But I am thinking of “conformity to nature” in a wider sense than this. We are being made aware that the organization of society on the principle of private profit, as well as public destruction, is leading both to the deformation of humanity by unregulated industrialism, and to the exhaustion of natural resources, and that a good deal of our material progress is a progress for which succeeding generations may have to pay dearly. I need only mention, as an instance now very much before the public eye, the results of “soil-erosion”—the exploitation of the earth, on a vast scale for two generations, for commercial profit: immediate benefits leading to dearth and desert. I would not have it thought that I condemn a society because of its material ruin, for that would be to make its material success a sufficient test of its excellence; I mean only that a wrong attitude towards nature implies, somewhere, a wrong attitude towards God, and that the consequence is an inevitable doom. For a long enough time we have believed in nothing but the values arising in a mechanized, commercialized, urbanized way of life: it would be as well for us to face the permanent conditions upon which God allows us to live upon this planet. —t.s. eliot from The Idea of a Christian Society, September 6, 1939

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L i n e s W r i t t e n a Fe w M i l e s A b o v e Ti n t e r n A b b e y Five years have past; five summers, with the length Of five long winters! and again I hear These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs With a sweet inland murmur.*—Once again Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs, Which on a wild secluded scene impress Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect The landscape with the quiet of the sky. The day is come when I again repose Here, under this dark sycamore, and view These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts, Which, at this season, with their unripe fruits, Among the woods and copses lose themselves, Nor, with their green and simple hue, disturb The wild green landscape. Once again I see These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines Of sportive wood run wild; these pastoral farms, Green to the very door; and wreathes of smoke Sent up, in silence, from among the trees, With some uncertain notice, as might seem, Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods, Or of some hermit’s cave, where by his fire The hermit sits alone. Though absent long, These forms of beauty have not been to me, As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye: But oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the din Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,

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In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart, And passing even into my purer mind With tranquil restoration:—feelings too Of unremembered pleasure; such, perhaps, As may have had no trivial influence On that best portion of a good man’s life; His little, nameless, unremembered acts Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust, To them I may have owed another gift, Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood, In which the burthen of the mystery, In which the heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world Is lighten’d:—that serene and blessed mood, In which the affections gently lead us on, Until, the breath of this corporeal frame, And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul: While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things. If this Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft, In darkness, and amid the many shapes Of joyless day-light; when the fretful stir Unprofitable, and the fever of the world, Have hung upon the beatings of my heart, How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee O sylvan Wye! Thou wanderer through the wood How often has my spirit turned to thee! And now, with gleams of half-extinguish’d thought, With many recognitions dim and faint, 44

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And somewhat of a sad perplexity, The picture of the mind revives again: While here I stand, not only with the sense Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts That in this moment there is life and food For future years. And so I dare to hope Though changed, no doubt, from what I was, when first I came among these hills; when like a roe I bounded o’er the mountains, by the sides Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams, Wherever nature led; more like a man Flying from something that he dreads, than one Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then (The coarser pleasures of my boyish days, And their glad animal movements all gone by,) To me was all in all.—I cannot paint What then I was. The sounding cataract Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock, The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, Their colours and their forms, were then to me An appetite: a feeling and a love, That had no need of a remoter charm, By thought supplied, or any interest Unborrowed from the eye.—That time is past, And all its aching joys are now no more, And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur; other gifts Have followed, for such loss, I would believe, Abundant recompence. For I have learned To look on nature, not as in the hour Of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes The still, sad music of humanity, Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power To chasten and subdue. And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean, and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man, A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still A lover of the meadows and the woods, And mountains; and of all that we behold From this green earth; of all the mighty world Of eye and ear, both what they half-create,* And what perceive; well pleased to recognize In nature and the language of the sense, The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul Of all my moral being. .

Nor, perchance, If I were not thus taught, should I the more Suffer my genial spirits to decay: For thou art with me, here, upon the banks Of this fair river; thou, my dearest Friend, My dear, dear Friend, and in thy voice I catch The language of my former heart, and read My former pleasures in the shooting lights Of thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little while May I behold in thee what I was once, My dear, dear Sister! And this prayer I make, Knowing that Nature never did betray The heart that loved her; ‘tis her privilege, Through all the years of this our life, to lead From joy to joy: for she can so inform The mind that is within us, so impress With quietness and beauty, and so feed With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues, Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,

Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all The dreary intercourse of daily life, Shall e’er prevail against us, or disturb Our chearful faith that all which we behold Is full of blessings. Therefore let the moon Shine on thee in thy solitary walk; And let the misty mountain winds be free To blow against thee: and in after years, When these wild ecstasies shall be matured Into a sober pleasure, when thy mind Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms, Thy memory be as a dwelling-place For all sweet sounds and harmonies; Oh! then, If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief, Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts Of tender joy wilt thou remember me, And these my exhortations! Nor, perchance, If I should be, where I no more can hear Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams Of past existence, wilt thou then forget That on the banks of this delightful stream We stood together; and that I, so long A worshipper of Nature, hither came, Unwearied in that service: rather say With warmer love, oh! with far deeper zeal Of holier love. Nor wilt thou then forget, That after many wanderings, many years Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs, And this green pastoral landscape, were to me More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake. —william wordsworth

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Th e N at u r a l Wo r l d The bead-cold eyes of the Great Blue Heron, that should be called the Great Grey, spot a shiny sliver looming beneath the water. The silverling fish snatches the gnats, links in the great grey chain —winged lightlings, gossamer light greylings. The fish is about to forget itself and become the heron, the heron being what’s called cruel and selfish too, but that’s natural, grey-winged necessity. The heron homes-in across the water; the water that’s as grey as the heron, fish, rocks, day and the background glimmering city— habitat of the laughing species. Now it’s time to praise the Great Grey.



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M a r s h a l l Wa s h e r 1 They are cowshit farmers, these New Englanders who built our red barns so admired as emblems, in photograph, in paint, of America’s imagined past (backward utopians that we’ve become). But let me tell how it is inside those barns. Warm. Even in dead of winter, even in the dark night solid with thirty below, thanks to huge bodies breathing heat and grain sacks stuffed under doors and in broken windows, warm, and heaped with reeking, steaming manure, running with urine that reeks even more, the wooden channels and flagged aisles saturated with a century’s excreta. In dim light, with scraper and shovel, the manure is lifted into a barrow or a trolley (suspended from a ceiling track), and moved to the spreader—half a ton at a time. Grain and hay are distributed in the manger, bedding of sawdust strewn on the floor. The young cattle and horses, separately stabled, are tended. The cows are milked; the milk is strained and poured in the bulk tank; the machines and all utensils are washed with disinfectant. This, which is called the “evening chores,” takes about three hours. Next morning, do it again. Then after breakfast hitch the manure spreader to the old Ferguson and draw it to the Meadows, where the manure is kicked by mechanical beaters onto the snow. When the snow becomes too deep for the tractor, often about mid-January, then load the manure on a horse-drawn sled and pitch it out by hand. When the snow becomes too deep for the horses make your dung heap behind the barn. Yes, a good winter means no dung heap; but a bad one 48

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may mean a heap as big as a house. And so, so, night and morning and day, 365 days a year until you are dead; this is part of what you must do. Notice how many times I have said “manure”? It is serious business. It breaks the farmers’ backs. It makes their land. It is the link eternal, binding man and beast and earth. Yet our farmers still sometimes say of themselves, derogatively, that they are “cowshit farmers.” 2 I see a man with a low-bent back driving a tractor in stinging rain, or just as he enters the doorway in his sheepskin and enormous mittens, stomping snow from his boots, raising his fogged glasses. I see a man in bib overalls and rubber boots kneeling in cowshit to smear ointment on a sore teat, a man with a hayfork, a dungfork, an axe, a 20-pound maul for driving posts, a cantook, a grease gun. I see a man notching a cedar post with a double-blade axe, rolling the post under his foot in the grass: quick strokes and there is a ringed groove one inch across, as clean as if cut with the router blade down at the mill. I see a man who drags a dead calf or watches a barn roaring with fire and thirteen heifers inside, I see his helpless eyes. He has stood helpless often, of course: when his wife died from congenital heart disease a few months before open-heart surgery came to Vermont, when his sons departed, caring little for the farm because

he had educated them—he who left school in 1931 to work by his father side on an impoverished farm in an impoverished time. I see a man who studied by lamplight, the journals and bulletins, new methods, struggling to buy equipment, forty years to make his farm a good one; alone now, his farm the last on the clay Hill, where I myself remember ten. He says “I didn’t mind it” for “I didn’t notice it,” “dreened” for “drained,” “climb” (pronounced climm) for “climbed,” “stanched” for “stanchion,” and many other unfamiliar locutions; but I have looked them up, they are in the dictionary, standard speech of lost times. He is rooted in history as in the land, the only man I know who lives in the house where he was born. I see a man alone walking his fields and woods, knowing every useful thing about them, moving in a texture of memory that sustains his lifetime and his father’s lifetime. I see a man falling asleep at night with thoughts and dreams I could not infer —and would not if I could— in his chair in front of the television. 3 I have written of Marshall often, for his presence is in my poems as in my life, so familiar that it is not named; yet I have named him sometimes too, in writing as in life, gratefully. We are friends. Our friendship began when I came here years ago, seeking what I had once known in southern New England, now destroyed. I found it in Marshall, among others.

He is friend and neighbor both, an important distinction. His farm is one-hundred-eighty acres (plus a separate woodlot of forty more), and one of the best-looking farms I know, sloping smooth pastures, elm-shaded knolls, a brook, a pond, his woods of spruce and pine, with maples and oaks along the road—not the showplace, not by any means, but a working farm with fences of old barbed wire; no pickets, no post-and-rail. His cows are Jerseys. My place, no farm at all, is a country laborer’s holding, fourteen acres “more or less” (as the deed says), but we adjoin. We have no fence. Marshall’s cows graze in my pasture; I cut my fuel in his woods. That’s neighborliness. And when I came here Marshall taught me… I don’t know, it seems like everything: how to run a barn, make hay, build a wall, make maple syrup without a trace of bitterness, a thousand things. (Though I thought I wasn’t ignorant when I came, and I wasn’t—just three-quarters informed. You know how good a calf is, born three-legged.) In fact half my life now, I mean literally half, is spent in actions I could not perform without his teaching. Yet it wasn’t teaching; he showed me. Which is what makes all the difference. In return I gave a hand, helped in the fields, started frozen engines, mended fence, searched for lost calves, picked apples for the cider mill, and so on. And Marshall, now alone, often shared my table. This too is neighborliness. 4 As for friendship, what can I say where words historically fail? s o

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It is something else, something more difficult. Not western affability, at any rate, that tells in ten minutes the accommodation of its wife’s—well, you know. Yankees are independent, meaning individual and strong-minded but also private; in fact private first of all. Marshall and I worked ten years together, and more than once in hardship. I remember the late January when his main gave out and we carried water, hundreds and thousands of gallons, to the heifers in the upper barn (the one that burned next summer), then worked inside the well to clear the line in temperatures that rose to ten below at noonday. We knew such times. Yet never did Marshall say the thought that was closest to him. Privacy is what this is; not reticence, not minding one’s own business, but a positive sense of the secret inner man, the sacred identity. A man is his totem, the animal of his mind. Yet I was angered sometimes. How could friendship share a base so small of mutual substance? Unconsciously I had taken friendship’s measure from artists elsewhere who had been close to me, people living for the minutest public dissection of emotion and belief. But more warmth was, and is, in Marshall’s quiet “hello” than in all those others and their wordiest protestations, more warmth and far less vanity. 5 He sows his millet broadcast, swinging left to right, a half-acre for the cows’ “fall tonic” before

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they go in the barn for good; an easy motion, slow swinging, a slow dance in the field, and just the opposite, right to left, for the scythe or the brush-hook. Yes, I have seen such dancing by a man alone in the slant of the afternoon. At his anvil with his big smith’s hammer he can pound shape back in the wagon iron, or tap a butternut so it just lies open. When he skids a pine log out of the woods he stands in front of his horse and hollers, “Gee-up, goddamn it,” “Back, you ornery son-of-a-bitch,” and then when the chain rattles loose and the log settles on the stage, he slicks down the horse’s sweaty neck and pulls his ears. In October he eases the potatoes out of the ground in their rows, gentle with the potato-hook, then leans and takes a big one in his hand, and rubs it clean with his thumbs, and smells it, and looks along the new-turned frosty earth to fields, to hills, to the mountain, forests in their color each fall no less awesome. And when in June the mowing time comes around and he fits the wicked cutter-bar to the Ferguson, he shuts the cats indoors, the dogs in the barn, and warns the neighbors too, because once years ago, many years, he cut off a cat’s legs in the tall timothy. To this day you can see him squirm inside when he tells it, and he must tell it, obsessively, June after June. He is tall, a little gray, a little stooped, his eyes crinkled with smile-lines, both dog-teeth gone. He has worn his gold-room spectacles so long he looks disfigured when they’re broken.

6 No doubt Marshall’s sorrow is the same as human sorrow generally, but there is this difference. To live in a doomed city, a doomed nation, a doomed world is desolating, and we all, all are desolated. But to live on a doomed farm

is worse. It must be worse. They the exact point of connection, gate of conversion, is— mind and life. The hilltop farms are going. Bottomland farms, mechanized, are all that survive. As more and more developers take over northern Vermont, values of land increase, taxes increase, farming is an obsolete vocation— while half the world goes hungry. Marshall walks his fields and woods, knowing every useful thing about them, and knowing his knowledge useless. Bulldozers, at least of the imagination, are poised to level every knoll, to strip bare every pasture. Or maybe a rich man will buy it for a summer place. Either way the link of the manure, that had seemed eternal, is broken. Marshall is not going now. And though I am only six or seven years his junior, I wish somehow I could buy the place, merely to assure him that for these few added years it might continue— drought, flood, or depression. But I am too ignorant, in spite of his teaching. This is more than a technocratic question. I cannot smile his quick sly Yankee smile in sorrow, nor harden my eyes with the true granitic resistance that shaped this land. How can I learn the things that are not transmissible? Marshall knows them. He possesses them, the remnants of human worth to admire in this world, and I think to envy. —hayden carruth

judith aronson



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Höfn The three-tongued glacier has begun to melt. What will we do, they ask, when boulder-milt Comes wallowing across the delta flats And the miles-deep shag ice makes its move? I saw it, ridged and rock-set, from above, Undead grey-gristed earth-pelt, aeon-scruff, And feared its coldness that still seemed enough To iceblock the plane window dimmed with breath, Deepfreeze the seep of adamantine tilth And every warm, mouthwatering word of mouth. —seamus heane y

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B e a r s at R a s p b e r r y Ti m e Fear. Three bears are not fear, mother and cubs come berrying in our neighborhood

orchard: how for a moment last spring it flowered serenely, translucently before yielding its usual

like any other family. I want to see them, or any distraction. Flashlight poking across the brook

summer crop of withered leaves. I waken, late, go to the window, look down to the orchard.

into briary darkness, but they have gone, noisily. I go to bed. Fear. Unwritten books

Is middle age what makes even dreams factual? The plum is serene and bright in new moonlight,

already titled. Some idiot will shoot the bears soon, it always happens, they’ll be strung up by the paws

dressed in silver leaves, and nearby, in the waste of rough grass strewn in moonlight like diamond dust,

in someone’s frontyard maple to be admired and measured, and I’ll be paid for work yet to be done—

what is it?—a dark shape moves, and then another. Are they ... I can’t be sure. The dark house

with a broken imagination. At last I dream. Our plum tree, little, black, twisted, gaunt in the

nuzzles my knee mutely, pleading for meaty dollars. Fear. Wouldn’t it be great to write nothing at all except poems about bears?

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—hayden carruth

All Rise Ladies and gents, a case is to be made. We call to your attention. Let the evidence show. We hereby call to the stand. We call Herr Auto. We call King Coal. We call Monsieur Velo. We call Dr. Frack. We call Old Sol. We all do solemnly swear to sell the truth. Herr Auto’s on a roll today. He’s burning rubber all over. King Coal is in the dumps. He smokes. His clouds hang low. M. Velo spins his wheels. He says it’s very simple. Dr. Frack assures and assures. He knows the drill. Old Sol quietly collects himself. Members of the jury, you have your instructions. The facts are clear. They speak for themselves. Ignore the clamor in the lobby. Take a deep breath if you still can. Don’t mind the heat. The choice is yours. We await your verdict. Finally the sentence, as you know, will be handed down. —david cavanagh



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Titania: Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain, As in revenge, have suck’d up from the sea Contagious fogs; which, falling in the land, Hath every pelting river made so proud That they have overborne their continents. The ox hath therefore stretch’d his yoke in vain, The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn Hath rotted ere his youth attain’d a beard. The fold stands empty in the drowned field, And crows are fatted with the murrion flock; The nine men’s morris is fill’d up with mud, And the quaint mazes in the wanton green, For lack of tread, are undistinguishable. The human mortals want their winter here; No night is now with hymn or carol blest. Therefore the moon, the governance of floods, Pale in her anger, washes all the air, That rheumatic diseases do abound. And through this distemperature, we see The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose, And on old Hiems’ thin and icy crown An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds Is, as in mockery, set. The spring, the summer, The chilling autumn, angry winter, change Their wonted liveries; and the mazed world, By their increase, now knows not which is which. And this same progeny of evils comes From our debate, from our dissension; We are their parents and original. Oberon: Do you amend it then, it lies in you?

—william shakespeare from A Midsummer Night’s Dream

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Il Dodo

Il Kiwi

Voi pensate soltanto ai dinosauri, così dite che non è colpa vostra. . . Ma il tilacino, il quagga, l’alca, l’uro, il visone marino, l’aepyornis, il delfino dello Yangtze, l’antilope azzurra, i moa, il gufo facciabianca e tutti quelli di cui resta solo un’eco, un nome, un osso, dei disegni in un museo com’è successo a me? Ve lo dico in parole molto semplici: state attenti: prima o poi tocca a voi.

Th e D o d o You think only about the dinosaurs, thus you say that it is not your fault… but what of the Tasmanian tiger, the plains zebra, the auk, the auroch, the sea mink, the elephant bird, the Yangtze river dolphin, the blue antelope, the wingless moa, the white-faced owl and all those of whom there remains only an echo, a name, a bone, some drawings in a museum as is the case with me? I tell you in very simple words: take care: sooner or later, it’s your turn.

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Siete killer da sempre, io roba da kebab, krapfen di carne, pollo senz’ali kaputt subito. E se ci fosse un karma?

Th e K i w i You guys are killers since forever, I’m stuff for kebab, crullers of meat, wingless chicken promptly kaput. And if there were a karma?

—antonello borra Translated by Blossom S. Kirschenbaum

Instructions to a Seed (Matthew 13:7)

ly n n e j a e g e r w e i n s t e i n

Don’t worry; you’re in darkness now and very small but you have it in you. There’s nothing to do except grow. You’ve got to draw your only nourishment from whatever surrounds you. You can’t change location. If you fell among thorns it’s too bad; you’ll be stifled or die. No one will care: there are so many seeds that are also in darkness with dispositions. Just grow.

—david curzon



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News although we would prefer to talk and talk it into psychological theory the prevalence of small genocides or the recent disease floating toward us from another continent we must not while she speaks her eyes frighten us she is only one person she tells us her terrible news we want to leave the room we may not we must listen in this wrong world this is what we must do we must bear it —grace pale y 60

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Wh at K i n d o f Ti m e s A r e Th e s e There’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted who disappeared into those shadows. I’ve walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don’t be fooled, this isn’t a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here, our country moving closer to it’s own truth and dread, it’s own ways of making people disappear. I won’t tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods meeting the unmarked strip of light— ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise: I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear. And I won’t tell you where it is, so why do I tell you anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these to have you listen at all, it’s necessary To talk about trees. —adrienne rich



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Mother At what moment Mort entered the molecules and triggered fanatic cells to race ahead at the speed of night, breaking rules, overwhelming regular cell pace, surprising the constitution, we’ll never know; whether you were making dinner, on the bus down town, fixing your hair, washing dishes; whatever minor essential chore you tackled with such care. Nor, can we know why Mort chose to show up—our mother, our world, our cosmology, our Blarney Street Gaia, our Dana—just below the first sphere where you lugged us furled, curled and kicking into this world. What to do, but believe the white-coated men, ma, explorers of your innards, focusing a wee telescope, on hearing of something called haematuria, up into your system, our worldscope. • Pre-empt the very thought we have Mr. Mort for life-long company, the first man himself, the Commander-in-Chief we ought keep in mind daily, dispatching his army, swarming the appalled cells one and all, storming the good and innocent. What gall. Our world’s under general anaesethetic.

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The doctor cuts the first nick. Quick, cut out the covert platoon, cauterise bleeding cells, and not a fraction too soon. Are they ringing knells? Cut and lay them out in a bloody row, then suture with simple catgut. Sew and pray to your God they don’t regrow. • Then the suspense, the meaning of hope, the not-a-word-time, the learning-to-cope, the thinking-the-best, the worst forgotten in these testing times, each test showing up okay, negative is the word they say. How positive can negative be? Listen. Mort knocks. The chap with a measured box. • No further symptoms, no blood in the urine, all your atoms are just fine. We should all know such days each day: the fridge hums, the kettle on the boil calls cha, clothes on the line wave “Top of the morning, Ma.” A shirt and a blouse link arms. “The drying is good today and not a sign

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of rain,” you say. The clock strikes a Saturday morning nine. All the rooftops in our window shine, heliographing you’re fine. • Brother Doctor wants to talk to us alone. Yes, it’s confirmed. It’s a relapse alright. The word relapse is a phone ringing in the middle of the night. • The destructive cells, concealed in your bowels, head out undercover into the flow of your blood, gather in the roots of each lung, spread, undo your parenchyma, undo the tree of your lungs, ma. • I switch on the daily news to see what’s old. Mayhem and Mort are general. It seems the whole show is terminal. What could we do, all told? We who have come from you. • Nothing else to be done, we said. Even as we consult, the dire cells spread. So Commander Cisplatin and Captain Taxol

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are trooped out to give that evil shower a taste of their own medicine, violence answering violence. We stick to routine, even joke. You ask for silence and say, “Now please, no fuss. We, loves, are a credit to us.” • Now your spirits are up. You request a cup of tea—no sugar, just a drop of milk. You sit and you sup. You make ready again for hope, tiresome hope. • Our Gaia comes apart. Turn off the news. Have a heart. How the world wags. Metastases overtakes her carcass, causing paralysis, headaches. For earth’s sakes. All you can do now is vaguely shake your head. The black-suited cells have nowhere else to spread.





—greg delanty

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B u r i e d Tr e a s u r e Water old as dinosaurs lies under the Greek earth. Dig a well and it fills with clear fossil water or did until yesterday. Now no-one drinks the water of Argos; a thousand wells have drained the plain where Agamemnon’s horses grazed. Tankers bring liquid treasure to the Aegean islands in summer so sweating tourists can bathe. They don’t ask where this treasure comes from; content to feel its coolness on their skin they stand, eyes closed like Danäe in her shower of liquid gold. declan mcc abe



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—gail holst-warhaft

Fo s s i l

Po s t c a r d f o r a Pa i n t i n g

The fossil fish is embedded in stone with only skeleton left, the backbone that gave him, while alive,

Send me your last painting and I will send a postcard in which I attack no one.

structure, sufficient rigidity to permit a swift correction of path, and ribs that protected a simple heart and the tracts of other inward parts, with what remains being a readable essence revealed as it never was in the brief living, fixed and oblivious in the rock where it continues.

I must be losing my angry young man silhouette, slipping into a gauzy side-view of the boundless nada of the new millennium. There’s news from the front, where I fight, and from the back, where I run when I can’t take any more.

—wyn cooper

—david curzon



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mariana cook

P i e d B e au t y Glory be to God for dappled things— For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough; And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. All things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise him. —gerard manle y hopkins



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O f M u lt i t u d e

va l e r i e s . b a n s c h b ac h

Array of hedgehogs Catch of fish Clump of trees Colony of ants Down of hares Flight of bees Haul of fish Herd of seals Hive of bees Husk of hares Nest of rabbits Nest of ants Pod of seals Pod of whales Rookery of seals School of dolphins School of whales Shoal of mackerel Shoal of fish Shoal of herring Skulke of foxes Swarm of bees Take of fish Remember me. —eamonn wall

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Artillera Because I so love cow bells I hung one on our only cow a giant black and white Santanderina. Ca-lang ca-lang ca-lang the slow and steady rhythm as she treads the slick cobblestones traversing the still village headed to pasture. In the dawn of evening she returns on her own to be milked. With my head pressed against her hot flank that smells so clean and bovine, I gently pull the warm liquid from her swollen udder and tell her how fine she is. The milk drills into the bucket while Artillera slowly grinds her feed. Milking done I pick the fat ticks from the hollows between leg and udder. She keeps with her slow and steady chewing. Only in heat does a cow lose her equanimity. —ken hebson



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How Knowledge Happens As if the world (or what could be seen from the window) were suddenly one vast curtain or hanging tapestry at once a thing organic and theatrical of green although it’s only trees-in-leaf blinding air beyond this building yet telling you something of the awful immensity alive at all those edges where your body stops and something stares immutable and imperturbable as marble down at you—seeing how the topmost green is altering already towards russet and granting you the ineluctable immitigable shape of things to come—the purest what-is-happening. —eamon grennan

C o m e b a c k w i t h S wa n s At a distance their whiteness gets lost in the platinum dazzle off lake water they’ve fashioned for years their life on finding its silence (broken only by wind among the reeds or the mourning cry any summer evening of a solitary sandpiper or in winter by the keen lamentations the sheep send down from Tully Mountain) the right sphere for their families and passions to thrive in (their decent storm-defying hungers and their mute mutual enduring attention) so even at this distance they’re a comfort whenever he gets back and their kind of abiding says something he can trust: they’re here he’s back it’s enough. —eamon grennan

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Fa l l L i g h t

da n i e l b a r l ow

The light in my dining room turns golden for two weeks each fall. I sit, read, and write in that room at that time of year. A north-facing room usually slightly blue in tone, even when sun comes in under the porch roof and through the side window early mornings. The tree’s color does not rivet one, not the deep reds, various oranges, or the purples of the most striking trees, or especially those with variegated leaves, but draws attention nonetheless. For a time the tree stands stately yellow, like the sun at height if you could look at it and that is the light the tree reflects and diffuses into my room through the huge leaded picture window the original housewrights thought to put looking out on the town thoroughfare. The sun, in its southern sphere now, hits the tree full on. Nothing much going on in the street beyond the hedge, this quiet part of the world’s bustle now in the tall maple’s shadow. But in here, illumination a painter might die for, a photographer would use filters to achieve, and which in cinema would be memory itself. The several million leaves, unnoticed each by each, fall, after they shine and fade like individual frames in this part of the movie we call Days, till the last one passes from light into the rolling dark. —leland kinse y

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E a r t h - S pa r r o w The trees in clouds of November mist Standing empty and the massive earth bare I bent my head and leaned myself against Interior gales and blizzards of unrest Facing the squalor of November air But stopped at last and skyward with shredded Arms lifting ribbons of fingers and prayers I caught in that beseeching of the cloud A leafless lightning-splintered oak unshrouding its wreckage in the waste of the year To whose ultimate twig with a glide and Dip a sparrow summited and there bursting as if the dead sap kept singing I leaned Forward knowing nothing to lean on Green as the grasslessness Lord of the earth. —galway kinnell

ov e r l e a f ,

“L a k e N a k u r u , K e n ya ” —elizabeth ungerleider 76

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Fo r t h e L a s t C ata m o u n t The round, descending eye of fire narrows down the gun-sight valley. A hawk hangs perfectly still, then sheers toward the river.

She recognizes what can only be summoned in dreams: his likeness driven from and nearing her. He stands in wait by the trees.

Day-heavy, lazing on a warming rock, the gold head of teeth and thicklidded opals shifts, yawning under the sun’s attentions.

Night and hunger, one being, will fall soon enough, patiently hunting the mouth of the river to follow the valley upstream.

Her paws go soft now. She dozes. Skirling blackflies and the quick water’s reassuring purl meld to a rustle of parting growth.

She wakens without expectation. Water, kill, sleep, the passing light— the labors of a daily birth, in a world of endings. —ralph culver



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Of course, we are driven by self-interest, it’s necessary to survive. But we need wise self-interest that is generous and co-operative, taking others’ interests into account. Co-operation comes from

friendship, friendship comes from trust, and trust comes from kind-heartedness. Once you have a genuine sense of concern

for others, there’s no room for cheating, bullying or exploitation.



—His Holine ss the Dal ai Lama

speaking at Middlebury College, Vermont october, 2013

To be nobody-but-yourself—in a world which is doing its

best, night and day, to make you everybody else—means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight: and never stop fighting.

—e. e. cummings

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Fo r Th e R e c o r d Today on Mallet’s Bay Avenue I am undone by the redivivus of wonder and not simply by the winter-blade sun stirring up the snow’s phosphorescence, the underiridescence of a pigeon’s neck, the jaguar in the guise of the svelte street cat. Not simply these, but the exhaust fuming from a passing car, made all the more visible by the freeze of air, the cumulus of stacks of smoke billowing heavenward from McNeil’s Generator and the jet drawing a line of coke behind it on the sky’s blue counter. Yes, these are not breath or cloud or anything to be high on; they are undoing our skies: the car we drive, the coffee pot plugged in each morning and so on and so forth, but it’s nothing but lies not to reiterate how we somehow manage mostly to live together—confused only by ourselves, our ghostly genes of fear and survival, too quick to be undone by our invention—mad to be under the sun. —greg delanty

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Consump tion It goes on around us, even in the night: mandibles begin their crunching early, in the dew-drenched grass before first light. Under leaves, in shadows, hidden from the sun, digestive enzymes gurgle and break down the morsels: bones, raw flesh. Midday, the lizards on the rocks flick tongues, devouring a mess of flies. Wood-mites soften logs to mesh in boggy acres. Almost invisible, the fire ants feed within the swamp on seeds. Those lonely strikers, owls and hawks, sweep the lanes for accidental feasts. All the men and women, in this vein, must tear and suck, must chew and swallow. Everything dissolves that once was whole, is caught off-guard, left quietly alone to think or rest, as everything at last is taken, mouthed to bursting, bellied, gathered in a rich black seam, its energies unleashed and lavished on the world. —jay parini



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Th e N e w Pa s t o r a l i s t s Good it is to get off the beaten track, to chance upon this untrodden realm: the mall of trees, fluttering pennants of leaves and butterflies, wild flowers, the creek. Arcadia. The dragonflies are stretch-limos chauffering spirits of the natural world through the portals of our senses. The muse of the pastoral steps down the waterfalls in her dashing white gown. She requests makers to burst forth into idylls once more, especially now we mortally hurt her. The trees and water applaud. —greg delanty



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Even with weaving in and out among the popples I find the going much easier on this ghost-road than it would be just a few feet to either side. The loggers drove along the natural terracing of the slope, steering around the outcrops and erratics that punctuate the syntax of the forest. Walking on this vestigial track, I also avoid the shattered trunks and fallen branches that elsewhere tilt together into barricades. So I always keep my eye out for the scars. —john elder from Reading the Mountains of Home Harvard University Press (1999)

The care of the Earth is our

most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what

remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.



—wendel l berry

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A f t e r S u Tu n g P ’ o My second story window is green Filled with fresh maple leaves And sun falls below where day lilies Along the roadside wave and fade.

Seeking Rest Late night, dark night, the house hums around me. Woods hide animals within, abounding. High wind swirls the stars around me.

How soon the earth swings after solstice And the sun past dinner fails. Come now, close your book, There will be dark enough and soon To sit and study by your lamp. —ellen mcculloch-lovell

Closed and still, I hear and say the names that do not stay in place when night has found me. Everything is shifting. —ellen mcculloch-lovell



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Ve r m o n t i s t h e N e w F l o r i d a We didn’t believe it until we saw a crocodile in our neighbor’s yard, jaw opened, famished for the taste of a pale, plump Vermonter. We called 911. “That’s nothing,” said the dispatcher. “We got water mocassins, copperheads, coral snakes on the town green; parrots raiding all the bird feeders; weedeaters busting from trying to keep one whack ahead of the Pueraria lobata, the kudzu vine that ate the south, now eating its way north; dozens of malaria cases reported over at the hospital. We’ll be there soon as we can. Just sit tight, and do not feed the crocodile or try to wrestle it, one more casualty we can’t stay on top of!”

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We sat tight. Tried to look on the bright side, the silver linings in the clouds that kept sending rain, rain flooding the fields,

Bing Crosby CDs and downloads of “White Christmas” accompanied by warning labels: May Cause Sadness. Listen at Your Own Risk!

turning our kale and spinach beds into rice paddies, drenching the drains, bending the birches. Soon it was official: Vermont was the new Florida;

Hardy Vermonters, we regrouped: traded in our snowblowers & plows for kayaks to paddle up our driveways; in January, we went water skiing

all the school charts had to be revised: new state bird, new state flower, new blueribbon categories at Addison County Field Days: sweetest pineapple, biggest

on the Champlain Sea; didn’t have to board a plane to a time share on a beach. We made lemonade out of the lemons now growing in the old apple orchards;

cotton ball, best Key Lime Pie; winter now always in quote marks, as in “this winter” we went “snow” shoeing over the swampy pastures,

and yearly on Town Meeting Day, we gathered on the green to pay respects and lay our bougainvillea bouquets by the statue of the prophet-patriot,

catching crayfish in the netting; winter now unheard of, except for an increase in seasonal nostalgic disorder, especially around the holidays;

the plaque so overgrown with moss, it was hard to read the name with missing letters: _ ill ___ibben, and below, a still legible: Rectus erat. He was right. for Bill McKibben

—julia alvarez

Harvest At last I am shaking my own hands, opening them to a brightly lit silence that is nothing more, nothing less than sacred music. I am finally hearing the chords playing for me, louder than all the shoes scuffling across China, louder than all the BMWs in East Hampton. I am sifting this harvest through my fingers. It will fill me for years to come with wheat and greens, with clear, cool waters. My arms gather the harvest of fears: fears of stepping off mountains; fears of dreams; fears of dark highways; fears of dying; fears of being alive. My fists assemble the harvest of loss: loss of parents; loss of youth; loss of hope. I am culling the nutrients of my decades, rubbing them into my skin; holding them under my tongue. I wake to this music and know that intimacy means touching fingers with those who have shared a single measure, an entire symphony. —marjorie ryerson 88

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Fr o m Wo o d y ’s R e s tau r a n t, M i d d l e b u r y Today, noon, a young macho friendly waiter and three diners, business types—two males, one female— are in a quandary about the name of the duck paddling Otter Creek, the duck being brown, but too large to be a female mallard. They really want to know, and I’m the human-watcher behind the nook of my table, camouflaged by my stillness and nonchalant plumage. They really want to know. This sighting I record in the back of my Field Guide to People. —greg delanty

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Tr a f f i c At whom are you honking? I hope not at me; it should be that mountainous black SUV, the one with the Jesus fish fixed to its tail, which just pushed a Prius right into the rail. At whom are you honking? Perhaps the Mercedes, which clearly thinks stoplights for weaklings and ladies, or maybe the little red Prizm, which likes to make sudden right turns into oncoming bikes. At whom are we honking? At titans of steel, the bodies of anger, which break on the wheel our generous spirits, our sense of how frail— and also that Lexus! I hope his brakes fail. —rachel trousdale

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B i k e Po l i t i c Without doubt good for the environment. At least we think so. Seems likely. At least it isn’t bad. Good enough to go on. Good enough for a spin. As if it’s not too late. Well, no matter what, environment will endure. Just maybe without us. If it could or cared to say, we might hear, Human, you took yourself for one wild ride. And now, a nasty teenage crash. Time’s up. You had your fun. Paid little heed. Look, no kid who grabbed dad’s keys, roared off with his buddies and ran into a pole ever gave a thought to what comes next. Until ‘next’ took over the wheel and rammed the future home.

b e n c ava n ag h

Time now to die off, let some other creature have its day. Flour beetles are a good bet. Or something simple, single-celled, that takes a long, slow time to learn what works. I’ll miss you, though. Such lunacy. The pedals turn. The wheels turn. No word from head quarters. On with the ride. —david cavanagh s o

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O d e t o M t. P h i l o After avocado-colored inclines, after dawdling ascents over fern & foliage, after long trillium gazes and careful steppings over outcrops of rocks which if not careful could trip to foil, after delicate trail talk, marriages and births, dates remembered, quarrels squashed, the tentative pace of the new in-law, the sure-footedness of the long-ago loved, after stop-offs to catch breath, a swig and quaff, to take this much in, midway up journey, this resting place to further peaks and crests, after foothold and climb, after storm’s last sculpture of fallen trees, You, summit of my life, philosophy of sky, You, embezzling breaths from big and small mouths, so that all whisper your spread-out tabernacle, a new religion,— You ritual burst of mountain light and sparkling lake for which we line-up taking our turns in spawns of clicks and screens: panorama of foothills like green coats thrown open, clouds, if only we could reach & cup into our hands, and below, a stitched patchwork of land: lime-pastured like flattened squares of kale. We look. We marvel at how far we traveled through emerald, glitter, and beam. —major jackson 92

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The Second Coming Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? —wil liam b utler y eat s



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Jar of Effulgence Driving in brumal, bucolic Vermont I take a wrong turn, preoccupied with the radio news: climate change, war, famine, the whole ding-dong; how we must choose as the fumes in the rear view mirror are lowlit by the cold, contributing our own bit. The snow glistens, calling to mind the jar of effulgence shattering not just over this snowland, but over the chrome of a passing car, the farmyard’s heap of manure, even the silk-lined jackets of the prating Suits stalking the hallways of the Night House, hoarding the shards of light in underground shelters out of sight, lying now through the din of the airways. • Now relax, we must not let their dark shroud our lightning-bug existence, rob us of our modicum of pax, our birthright spark, the litscape heliographing, the light within responding. I locate myself again, spotting Camel’s Hump slouching through this white country. The seeds, shards, sparks of effulgence shimmer over all and sundry. —greg delanty 94

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“choice

on c amel’s hump”

johanna gardner

Po s t c a r d R e c i p e from Hunting Season Gunshots turn me sideways in my chair, face me out the window, duck sitting pretty for the kill. But it’s not me they want, they want the hearts of deer in their sights, slung in the backs of their pickups for show. Then they want them cooked in a pan over uneven heat, in Sprite instead of wine, ketchup instead of butter. Kill what is legal, I say, but don’t cook it badly. —wyn cooper

R e c o r d R a i n fa l l s On hold. The vegetable garden we prepared— weeding, smoothing planting rows of zinnias and cosmos, tomato plants ready to take off, pepper plants, cukes and more— all on hold, rotting in the wetness, we fear. But that’s the least of it. The flood watch, flood watch, flood watch makes wet seedlings count little. What about rushing streams that slide houses off their perch on the side of a mountain, crack open gaps in highways, tumble trees over roads. Record rains already for May and June and now more. That patter on the roof through the night and into today on and on and on, relentless, sinister in its innocent tone. —buff lindau

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Indian Boy Love Song #1 Everyone I have lost in the closing of a door the click of the lock is not forgotten, they do not die but remain within the soft edges of the earth, the ash of house fires and cancer in sin and forgiveness huddled under old blankets dreaming their way into my hands, my heart closing tight, like fists.

z ac h a r y s t e p h e n s

—sherman alexie



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S n o w Day Today we woke up to a revolution of snow, its white flag waving over everything, the landscape vanished, not a single mouse to punctuate the blankness, and beyond these windows

that the Kiddie Corner School is closed, the Ding-Dong School, closed. the All Aboard Children’s School, closed, the Hi-Ho Nursery School, closed, along with—some will be delighted to hear—

the government buildings smothered, schools and libraries buried, the post office lost under the noiseless drift, the paths of trains softly blocked, the world fallen under this falling.

the Toadstool School, the Little School, Little Sparrows Nursery School, Little Stars Pre-School, Peas-and-Carrots Day School the Tom Thumb Child Center, all closed, and—clap your hands—the Peanuts Play School.

In a while, I will put on some boots and step out like someone walking in water, and the dog will porpoise through the drifts, and I will shake a laden branch sending a cold shower down on us both.

So this is where the children hide all day, These are the nests where they letter and draw, where they put on their bright miniature jackets, all darting and climbing and sliding, all but the few girls whispering by the fence.

But for now I am a willing prisoner in this house, a sympathizer with the anarchic cause of snow. I will make a pot of tea and listen to the plastic radio on the counter, as glad as anyone to hear the news

And now I am listening hard in the grandiose silence of the snow, trying to hear what those three girls are plotting, what riot is afoot, which small queen is about to be brought down. —billy collins

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H i g h Wi n d s F l a r e U p a n d the Old House Shudders The dead should just shut up. Already they’ve ruined the new-plowed field: it looks like a grave. Adjacent pine-woods, another set of walls: in that dark room a birch, too young to have a waist, practices sway and bend, slope and give. And the bee at vertical rest on the outside pane, belly facing in, one jointed limb crooked to its mouth, the mouth at work— my lost friend, of course, who lifelong chewed his cuticles to the quick. Likewise Jane who calls from her closet of walnut and silk for her widower to stroke her breasts, her feet, although she has no breasts, she has no feet, exacting pity in their big white bed. The dead themselves are pitiless— they keen and thrash, or they lodge in your throat like a stone, or they descend as spring snow, as late light, as light-struck dust rises and descends—frantic for more, more of this earth, more of its flesh, more death, oh yes, and a few more thousand last vast blue cloud-blemished skies. —ellen bryant voigt



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Sugarloaf The brightness of the day we descend from rapidly. Wishing not to live longer but better, and alone in the wind, the afternoon, we stand looking out into the night past the names to the sea.

One is drawing and one is color. The background of the scene is in some unique proportion, one other than correct.

The wind won’t settle.

An old story of a house does not get told.

The three points of a triangle move around.

Our definitions run down a long straight road.

Clocks go around with the world.

The stars fall into the ocean and we look at them as if they are only stars.

People keep calling our names. They stare at other galaxies. They age in one direction. It happens all in one day. We’re not expecting anyone. Nature is not wont to speak.

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Our lives are not dictionaries.

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I walk into a shadow. It occurs to me that without some confidence, it is difficult to work, and we must work. —lesle lewis

S av o r down to the blue berry patch be hold the Perseids of fruit:: dead ripe constellations:: toss off the veil & strip the twigs fill a punnet a minute taste from each bush a nuance lip to love •

home roll out blind bake a pie & late in evening slice the open face

B l a c k b e r r y E at i n g I love to go out in late September among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries to eat blackberries for breakfast, the stalks very prickly, a penalty they earn for knowing the black art of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries fall almost unbidden to my tongue, as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words like strengths or squinched or broughamed, many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps, which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well in the silent, startled, icy, black language of blackberry eating in late September. —galway kinnell

now the sugar sheen of meteors over raw August quilt on the grass let the sky fall into your mouth —verandah porche

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Th e O t h e r Time to raise a paean to the olive-green slugs, mauve maggots, slime-emerald algae, dandruff-creamy worms who make nothing of the corpse. The diverse bugs we turn our heads away from, the loathsome swarms, the steaming dung dolloped on the soil that springs roses, potatoes, tomatoes, the food on our tables. Doff our hats to all the matter and mites we look down our snotty noses upon. Admit that we are blind, stupid, bats —praise the bats too—that we are the great ungrateful. Give thanks, erect monuments to them, the other beautiful. —greg delanty

First Question Scent of sage and thyme, shade laurel. Brown goats that turn back and stare. Lord, what took you so long? —fred marchant

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Day b r e a k

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On the tidal mud, just before sunset,
 dozens of starfishes
 were creeping. It was
 as though the mud were a sky
 and enormous, imperfect stars
 moved across it as slowly
 as the actual stars cross heaven.
 All at once they stopped,
 and, as if they had simply
 increased their receptivity
 to gravity, they sank down
 into the mud, faded down
 into it and lay still, and by the time
 pink of sunset broke across them
 they were as invisible
 as the true stars at daybreak.

—galway kinnell

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One of the most powerful visions I have experienced was the first photograph of the Earth from outer space. The image of a blue planet floating in deep space, glowing like the full moon on a clear night, brought home powerfully to me the recognition that we are indeed all members of a single family sharing one little house. —t he dal ai l ama

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O n t h e A m t r a k f r o m B o s t o n t o N e w Yo r k C i t y The white woman across the aisle from me says ‘Look, look at all the history, that house on the hill there is over two hundred years old,’ as she points out the window past me into what she has been taught. I have learned little more about American history during my few days back East than what I expected and far less of what we should all know of the tribal stories whose architecture is 15,000 years older than the corners of the house that sits museumed on the hill. ‘Walden Pond,’ the woman on the train asks, ‘Did you see Walden Pond?’ and I don’t have a cruel enough heart to break her own by telling her there are five Walden Ponds on my little reservation out West and at least a hundred more surrounding Spokane, the city I pretended to call my home. ‘Listen,’ I could have told her. ‘I don’t give a shit about Walden. I know the Indians were living stories around that pond before Walden’s grandparents were born and before his grandparents’ grandparents were born. I’m tired of hearing about Don-fucking-Henley saving it, too, because that’s redundant. If Don Henley’s brothers and sisters and mothers and father hadn’t come here in the first place then nothing would need to be saved.’ But I didn’t say a word to the woman about Walden Pond because she smiled so much and seemed delighted that I thought to bring her an orange juice 108

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back from the food car. I respect elders of every color. All I really did was eat my tasteless sandwich, drink my Diet Pepsi and nod my head whenever the woman pointed out another little piece of her country’s history while I, as all Indians have done since this war began, made plans for what I would do and say the next time somebody from the enemy thought I was one of their own. —sherman alexie

Th e S k u n k M o t h s The family of skunks, their backs to me from our deck, are like great black & white caterpillars. I imagine them the giant larvae of Luna moths or Monarch butterflies, their pupae unzipping, tremendous wings unfolding, fluttering about the summer airways, big as people; each revanchist proboscis exacting retribution for those we’ve not let flutter down the summers. Imagine their eyes, big as cow eyes, gazing, gazing at us. Imagine the Luna’s gossamer tulle wings, the tippets brushing us, fanning us tenderly, wrapping us in a veil, bringing us gently to our knees in a gathering humility, brushing aside our mortification, finally at home, natural in the natural world— their wings our cocoon—becoming ourselves, pinioned resplendence, the human mothfly. —greg delanty

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Rogue Moss Emboldened now, no longer earthbound, No more shrinking into the shadowy lee As if plain sight were a station Not for a moment to be contemplated, Shunning attention, renouncing ambition.

Aroused, impelled, sensing the main chance At last: the boxy cinderblock garage Put up who knows when, no pitch To that slab roof, rainwater pooling For days on end, tarpaper all rot and tatter.

Finespun still, but with a newfound fervor— None of that tremulous aversion To exposure, that fanatical clinging To fastidious humility, which is itself A form of overweening vanity.

Flaring this morning, distinctly glimmering, First thing one spots from the porch upslope— Fetching woven stuff, a living velvet sheen Stealing across that blistered surface Like a desert prophecy come to pass.

Lovely, the seeping cranny, sweet The rift where the mortar gives, the fissure Shivering through the loose garden slate— Possible to hold fast to all this Obliging neglect and still aspire.

Still emblematic of all that’s delicate, Everything chastened and constrained, But with a steelier glint, as if to offer proof That here is how another nature might yet Make itself felt: ascendant, rampant, plush.

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An Chorr Réisc

Th e H e r o n

Sí an chorr réisc ina staic a híomhá féin éin ina hiomláine san uisce.

The heron, stock-still, is her own bird image in the water.

Bronnann sí a foighne gan faic a dhúblaíonn an plána ar ais in aisce.

The surface doubles her patience, a gift, presented to us for nothing.

Geit thobann torann preabann scrogall gan gogal san airdeall.

Startled by an abrupt sound her neck erupts upright, totally alert.

Tumann inti féin arís go hionraic líonann dá doimhneacht ag stánadh.

She swoops back into her upright self again, brimming with her own depth, staring.

Fanann ina haonchruth comhlán dá gcorródh sheasódh lasmuigh dá scáil.

She stands perfectly fixed. If she stirred she’d slip outside her form.

Ionann iad. Féachann tríthi féin. Is léir dá súile éin gach corraíl go grinneall.

They’re all the one. She peers through her own bird’s eye view, clear to the bedrock.

Taoide isteach taoide amach, giobann goblach le straois ghoib gaois’ ársa.

Tide in tide out she scoops a beak full with a grin of antique wisdom. Translated by Greg Delanty

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—liam Ó muirthile

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from Th e E n d o f B r i t i s h Fa r m i n g Brian’s farm is a confusion of mist and rotting leaves. He slams the door of his Land Rover shut and tastes the air. “The supermarkets take the piss. Diversify? Into what? Tenant farmers are no match for the agribusiness people who buy everything and turn it arable. Up here the land is heavy clay.” —paul mcloughlin

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Country Relish

Country Relish

to Aine

do Áine Leathann dúichí meala ina slaoda ar mo theanga leis an muga tae baile cáis agus arán sóid; Magh Ealla anallód. An cuimhin leat an seanainm, stríoca ‘e phéint bhán ag an gcéad stad traenach tar éis an tolláin, cló corraiceach Gaelach ar chláracha dubha adhmaid? Shamhlaínn An Táin nó cor eile i síniú Aogáin. Próca Country Relish milis a dheineann Tigh na Rátha de Ringfort House East Putney, mo thriall ar deireadh thar d’ursain thall tar éis sí gaoithe an Underground. Chaith sé go mbíodh bó-airí tráth suite chun bia ar thráidirí urláir lán de sheanchas na tuaithe ag stealladh leamhnacht áineasa, ag innilt uaignis.

The sweet relish of our demesne is released on my tongue with the mug of strong tea from home, cheese and brown soda bread; the ancient cattle plains of Mallow. Do you remember the old name at the first train stop after the exit tunnel, the white brush strokes in rough Gaelic script on the black planks? It put me in mind of the Táin. A jar of sweet country relish turns Ringfort House, East Putney, into Tigh na Rátha, your station now above ground, after the souterrain of the Underground. It must have been the same for herders long ago, sitting around rough platters on land rich with the lore of their own ilk, pouring the frothy, creamy milk; loneliness grazing around them in the dark. Translated by Greg Delanty

—liam Ó muirthile



—liam Ó muirthile

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Th e B i r d s At dinner a friend admired the regular birds at our feeder: the seal-sleek grackles, the rouged house finch, the natty chickadees, the tan mourning doves. She asks if we had any unusual ones of late. I mentioned the cowbirds of today. She made a face, explained to our company how the cowbird is worse than any Old World cuckoo, laying eggs in a wider range of foster nests, the cowfledgling killing the host brood. As others at the table grimaced, I admitted a fondness for the cowbird, this cowboy in the brown hood, who, according to bird-heads, are thus since following bison across the plains, without any time to nest. What else could they do? We survive rightly or wrongly. And who are we to talk, us American flock? The birds might ask—even the cowbird—who is anyone to talk? Where are the great bison herds now? Ah, don’t be so hard on the cowbirds. They’re simply caught up in old ways. Besides, I like their silly finch-beaks stuck on their crow heads like those characters in that Greek comedy about a better world, high in Cloudcuckooland. Yes, like one of those characters in a Greek comedy. —greg delanty

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Th e B i r d Minding of itself, and mildly, in its finding, And modestly, submissive to the weather, Storm, wind, the birds’ peril, this bird I saw That did not see me in my human body watching. Watchful the bird was only of itself, And listening to itself, with softliest mutter, And twitter, and quietest fluttering of feather, Attentive to the minutiae of its task. —david ferry

judith aronson



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Gifts of Rain I Cloudburst and steady downpour now for days. Still mammal, straw-footed on the mud, he begins to sense weather by his skin. A nimble snout of flood licks over stepping-stones and goes uprooting. He fords his life by sounding. Soundings. II A man wading lost fields breaks the pane of flood: a flower of mud— water blooms up in his reflection like a cut swaying its red spoors through a basin. His hands grub where the spade has uncastled

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sunken drills, an atlantis he depends on. So he is hooped to where he planted and sky and ground

arrives my need for antediluvian lore. Soft voices of the dead are whispering by the shore

are running naturally among his arms that grope the cropping land.

that I would question (and for my children’s sake) about crops rotted, river mud glazing the baked clay floor.

III When rains were gathering there would be an all-night roaring off the ford. Their world-schooled ear could monitor the usual confabulations, the race unfurling past the gable, the Moyola harping on its gravel beds: all spouts by daylight brimmed with their own airs and overflowed each barrel in long tresses. I cock my ear At an absence— in the shared voices of blood



IV The tawny guttural water spells itself: Moyola is its own score of consort, bedding the locale in the utterance, reed music, an old chanter breathing its mists through vowels and history. A swollen river, a mating call of sound rises to pleasure me, Dives, hoarder of common ground. —seamus heane y s o

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On Reading the Diaries of Christopher Columbus The weather’s like April in Andalucía, with zephyrs, and the mornings are a delight. Thus wrote Don Christóbal, and so say I, having come down from my skylight, making the best of becalmed weather, to the stern deck overlooking our garden with the un-raked grass turning from green to gold. So much of today, I imagine, becoming so much of that day, everything becoming everything. A brown-headed, red bodied damselfly settles on our transom before taking off. She zips open space, the damselpoetry herself, winging it back and forth from place and time, now to this geezer, then back to Don Christóbal Colon on this Friday the thirteenth, lucky as any day, to inform him he might have stayed at home, that the booty is hereandhereandhere, the mirabilia of the Now World. Look, how the bluebottle who yesterday was wingèd disease, has turned into a blue-green gem glimmering on my page, straight off today’s diadem. —greg delanty 122

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E a r t h Te a r e r It takes Erysichthon to get under the skin of Demeter, axing trees of the sacred grove to construct a compound replete with hobnobbing halls, chambers, spas, seraglio. Even after the blade bites, bark-blood spurting upon the earth and a green voice warns him off, he hacks on. Though for sure, this mortal and his minions cleave limb after limb as a way of normalising plunder, slashing into bloody oblivion. Dryads broadcast. Birds scatter. Animalcules and larger creatures cry. Unseen denizens of purlieus are gone for ever; cures maybe even for Erysichthon’s purblind sight. Demeter swings into action, dispatching green heralds, tendril pursuivants to the ends of the earth, orders Famine to plant hunger in this hatchet man that grows the more he devours ’til nothing’s left to procure food but trade his own offspring— “our legacy” he once called her. What could the child do but shape-change, sell herself to stay with her father? Every mouthful increases appetite till the spoiler has nothing to turn on but his own body, the manducation of his own flesh, biting into the demon of famine swelling within, his stomach like a starving child’s belly, pregnant with hunger. You can feel the mandibles dissolve round their own dissolving flesh. —greg delanty



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Black Snow David points at the two-day snow along Broadway, not the natural jaundiced yellow of melting slush, but bunkers of fallen smog-snow. He remarks: ‘that’s what we breathe in every day’, reminding me of how the nuns described the soul as a flake of snow and every trespass soot-darkens that whiteness of whiteness. Ah, the soul of the world is made manifest to us today on Broadway and 82nd, a fuming black exhausted snow-soul, woebegone as a bewildered oil-slick bird unable to fly. —greg delanty

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“ m o u n ta i n to p - r e m o va l c oa l —george wuerthner

m i n e , v i r g i n i a .”

frederic larson/corbis

G l o b a l Wa r m i n g When his ship first came to Australia, Cook wrote, the natives continued fishing, without looking up. Unable, it seems, to fear what was too large to be comprehended. —jane hirshfield

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I n t h e N e x t G a l ax y Things will be different. No one will lose their sight, their hearing, their gallbladder. It will be all Catskills with brand new wrap-around verandas. The idea of Hitler will not have vibrated yet. While back here, they are still cleaning out pockets of wrinkled Nazis hiding in Argentina. But in the next galaxy, certain planets will have true blue skies and drinking water.

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—ruth stone

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Th e A l i e n I’m back again scrutinizing the Milky Way of your ultrasound, scanning the dark matter, the nothingness, that now the heads say is chockablock with quarks & squarks, gravitons & gravitini, photons & photinos. Our sprout, who art there inside the spacecraft of your ma, the time capsule of this printout, hurling & whirling towards us, it’s all daft on this earth. Our alien who art in the heavens, our Martian, our little green man, we’re anxious to make contact, to ask questions about the heavendom you hail from, to discuss the whole shebang of the beginning & end, the pre-big bang untime before you forget the why and lie of thy first place. And, our friend,



to say Welcome, that we mean no harm, we’d die for you even, that we pray you’re not here to subdue us, that we’d put away our ray guns, missiles, attitude and share our world with you, little big head, if only you stay.

—greg delanty



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Wi n t e r G r e e n The green grass of January shocks softly, warns even as it cheers, more news than the news, cracks a frigid smile. —david cavanagh

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O ’ b r i e n ’s C o v e

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On days like this, water breaks new ground,

As an ancient breed of darkness from the creek suddenly swirled into long maple light, they ignore the change and mate on the wing filling the sky like revelation blind to us who seem no more than soil or wood or swallows that bolt their pale sealing of bodies down until this valley is a sun shower of sacrifice and desire, old names we rarely use, but always answer to.

giving birth to a hidden place where the point, bound by cedar and pine, is always just beyond us, taking time down to its original finish. On days like this, April greens the last burrs of frost out of its fur then stretches across sky until

—barry sternlieb

every reflection cracks wide open, holding nothing back. —barry sternlieb



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Names for Birds —So many birds are still here for us and their names. Juncos pine siskins loud relentless jay remind us how little we get to choose when it comes to a touch of color on grayest days —or in a cove by the sea the swan and its cygnet. Again the finches now and then egrets;

label we imagine gives a being— a voice—as new citizens register at polls and make thereby a presence known. I watched an animal watching me as it showered under the sprinkler between the dwarf false cypress and a lady’s-mantle I peered at it and watched

we talk we argue over what might be the proper name for this fisher of elvers on watch motionless at nightfall on granite coping of stream wall cormorant or junior heron —then at high tide come morning no one is up but one to see the Great Blue by the window

in the failing light and thought it peered at me but it was only a clod in shadow. I’d forgotten the remains of digging I had done: possessed of neither name nor motion no creature yet it seemed to watch as if hunting. Tufts of sod like ears curled aloft

none but one to verify and name. So many creatures have names for us to divide the world up into. So much more to be named than Adam who had no concern to separate lion from jaguar civet from house cat. Animals without voices to whom we give each a

listeedn through the swash of water but it was nothing. The mistakes were mine. Yet I had to ask if having names— as swans do this strong-necked cob paddling to command with calm pen keeping tabs at tideline on two cygnets—accounted for there being there knowing it was not so. —stephen sandy

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Ur God There’s something about the gourd, how each can look so absurd, and so different from the other—compare the egg gourd, say, with the turk’s turban or swan with the crown of thorns, pear, caveman’s club, dolphin, pumpkin, or the serpent inciting sin and knowledge. How could they be kin? They’re as various as their uses: currencies, condoms, bird-houses, marimbas—you name it. And the name, the concealed god within; our gourd whispering we’re all the same beneath the rind, the god we scour the earth for on our knees. Our word, who art on earth, hallowed be thy gourd. —greg delanty

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Some Effects of Global Wa r m i n g i n A d d i s o n C o u n t y The maples sweat now, out of season. Buds pop eyes in wintry bushes as the birds arrive, having not checked the calendars or clocks. They scramble in the frost for seeds, while underground a sobbing starts in roots and tubers. Ice cracks easily along the bank. It slides in gullies where a bear, still groggy, steps through coiled wire of the weeds. Kids in T-shirts run to school, unaware that summer is a long way off. Their teachers flirt with off-the-wall assignments, drum their fingers on the sweaty desktops. As for me, this heart leaps high— a deer escaping from the crosshairs, skipping over barely frozen water as the surface bends and splinters underfoot. —jay parini

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I n A K i t c h e n Wh e r e M u s h r o o m s We r e Wa s h e d In a kitchen where mushrooms were washed, the mushroom scent lingers. As the sea must keep for a long time the scent of the whale. As a person who’s once loved completely, a country once conquered, does not release that stunned knowledge. They must want to be found, those strange-shaped, rising morels, clownish puffballs. Lichens have served as a lamp-wick. Clean-burning coconuts, olives. Dried salmon, sheep fat, a carcass of petrel set blazing: light that is fume and abradement. Unburnable mushrooms are other. They darken the air they come into. Theirs the scent of having been traveled, been taken. —jane hirshfield



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At t h e S a p We l l s The yellow-bellied sap sucker clung to the birch outside my window and smelled the sap inside the phloem and started in with sudden taps to make a row of wells around the trunk that ran like liquor down the bark. “Oh taste and taste,” he called to the bees and hummingbirds who swiftly came to gulp from the holes. So much ellipsis halfway up. So much knocking on the bloody door. I thought of the gourd that shaded Jonah in the noon-day sun, then suddenly withered, inciting his rage outside of Ninevah. I thought of the darkness inside the whale that was

also God in His favorite garb, and the nature of mercy, how unnatural it is in the glory of nature. I wondered where his screed had gone, the prose or poem beyond his saw. Wondered next if every city has a similar tale that disappears; if warning alone suffices without the “script,” so every witness has to guess at what Jonah said that turned their minds, then find a new unwilling voice that isn’t his and is? I heard the silence then between his knocks outside the window and grieved the little clown’s falling off. I thought of whales off both the coasts of America, then dressed the birch in a vinyl wrap. Prayed for deliverance on my outsourced ladder. —chard deniord

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Th e R e f u s a l The big trout rose to your fly, and backed, still uplifting, downstream, then turned away, unfrightened. What could he have seen that told him “This is not real!” For after all, the light was right, your body camouflaged, the stream dappling your face with sun and leaf-shadow, and you stood quietly, the current soft around you the great sun swift all around you, and your shadow drifted soundless downstream, and after all you must have seemed only one particularlity among the gorgeous many.

—john engels

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Wav e s i n t h e Wo o d s Song Lyrics River, it was rising. Footing lost in the storm. Strange, what matters when flood sweeps over the corn. Fields disappearing; house might follow suit. What’s left to harvest? Stones where there once was fruit.

Head for the hills, darling. River’s at our door. Waves in the wood. You hear them roar? That was the stream we waded yesterday. Kissed on the rocks. Takes my breath away…

Friends and strangers gather trying to fix the harm. It’s a funny thing to say, “This is the best place to lose your farm.” Did you catch on YouTube: covered bridge went down? Horse and rider brave the water to get medicine to town.

They call it a hundred, a hundred-year storm. Did we turn the key; set the ocean to warm, tornado on spin, the heartland on dry? Tricky to prove but it’s hard to deny.

Future is a gamble. Change is in the air. Dance among the shambles. Dream beyond despair. In mother tongues I can’t pronounce, our children’s song resounds. Plant a tree or stanza deep in common ground.

—patty carpenter & verandah porche

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It must be this voice that is telling me to do something, and I am sure it’s the same voice that is speaking to everybody on this

planet—at least everybody who seems to be concerned about the fate of the world, the fate of this planet.

—wangar i maat hai

Founder of the Green Belt Movement & winner of the Nobel Peace Prize (1940–2011)

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Fo r t h e Ta k i n g Soon from rock a flower comes, gesture For which not one reason is given, which goes Beyond each storm and breath, curious Into the waiting of no particular save the hand That tears in. But if whatever moves Is moved by mistake, then all would be Wrong, which is not possible, not the wind, not The mountain, not the angle of light which tells The stranger to begin again, as he carries The flower to the last without asking. —sophie cabot black

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October The day was hot, and entirely breathless, so The remarkably quiet, remarkably steady leaf fall Seemed as if it had no cause at all. The ticking sound of falling leaves was like The ticking sound of gentle rainfall as They gently fell on leaves already fallen Or as, when as they passed them in their falling, Now and again it happened that one of them touched One or another leaf as yet not falling, Still clinging to the idea of being summer: As if the leaves that were falling but not the day, Had read, and understood, the calendar.

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—david ferry

Clothespins I’d like to have spent my life making Clothespins. Nothing would be harmed, Except some pines, probably on land I owned and would replant. I’d see My work on clotheslines near some lake, Up north on a day in October, Perhaps twelve clothespins, the wood Still fresh, and a light wind blowing. —robert bly

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from t h e Th i r d G e o r g i c o f Vi r g i l t r s l o f l l . 5 3 1 - 5 64 At that time, there, they say, men looked for cattle To sacrifice in the rituals of Juno, And there were nowhere any to be found. Ill-matched wild oxen had to be used to pull The chariots up to the goddess’s mountain temple; And men had to scratch at the earth by themselves with harrows, And use their own fingernails to dig the holes To plant their seeds in, and their own strained necks To drag their creaking wagons up the hills. No treacherous wolf then reconnoitered the sheepfold Nor prowled nocturnally around the flock; His own acute distress had made him tame; And timid does and shy elusive stags Wandered in public where there are dogs and houses; And there were many creatures of the deep Whose corpses lay on beaches like the bodies Of shipwrecked sailors washed up by the waves; And sea-calves fled from the sea to fresh-water rivers; And the viper perished, having vainly wound Into its winding hiding-place to hide; And the hydra too, its astonished scales erect. Nor was the air hospitable to birds: Falling they left their lives up under the clouds. Nor were there remedies that made things better;

The knowledge of those who study remedies, Like Chiron the son of Phillýra, or Melampus, Son of Amytháon, only did harm. Let up into the light from the Stygian shadows Pale Tisíphoné rages, driving on Terror and Plague before her and every day Raising up higher and higher her greedy head. The lowing of the cattle and bleating of sheep Is endlessly echoed back from waterless rivers, Dry banks, and supine hills. And now she brings Death to the many and heaps up in the stables Disgusting rotting deliquescent bodies, Until men have to learn to dig out pits And cover the bodies over and out of sight, For the hides could never be put to use, nor could They ever disinfect the meat by boiling. They couldn’t even sheer the wool and use it, It was so filthy and so full of the sickness; The cloth would hang untouchable on the loom; If any man should make a garment of it, Vile sweat and fever blisters would move across His stinking body, and pretty soon the anthrax, Ignis sacer, would have its way with him. —david ferry

I n t e r n at i o n a l C a l l A hand holds a receiver out a top-storey window in a darkening city. The phone is the old, black heavy type. From outside what can we make of such an event? The hand, which seems to be a woman’s, holds the phone away from her lover, refusing to let him answer his high-powered business call. More likely a mother has got one more sky-high bill and in a tantrum warns her phone-happy son she’ll toss the contraption. A demented widow, having cracked the number to the afterlife, holds the receiver out for the ghost of her lately deceased husband. He’s weary of heaven and wants to hear dusk birds, particularly the excited choir of city starlings. It’s always dusk now, but the receiver isn’t held out to listen to the birds of the Earth from Heaven. It’s the black ear and mouth in the hand of a woman as she asks her emigrated sisters and brothers in a distant country if they can hear the strafing, and those muffled thuds, how the last thud made nothing of the hospital where they were slapped into life. The hand withdraws. The window bangs closed. The city is shut out. Inside now, the replaced phone represses a moan. Its ear to the cradle listens for something approaching from far off.

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L i k e Th e S m a l l H o l e b y Th e Pat h - S i d e Something Lives In Like the small hole by the path-side something lives in, in me are lives I do not know the names of, nor the fates of, nor the hungers of or what they eat. They eat of me. Of small and blemished apples in low fields of me whose rocky streams and droughts I do not drink. And in my streets—the narrow ones, unlabelled on the self-map— they follow stairs down music ears can’t follow, and in my tongue borrowed by darkness, in hours uncounted by the self-clock, they speak in restless syllables of other losses, other loves. There too have been the hard extinctions, missing birds once feasted on and feasting. There too must be machines like loud ideas with tungsten bits that grind the day. A few escape. A mercy. They leave behind small holes that something unweighed by the self-scale lives in. —jane hirshfield

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A Wa k e O n L a k e C h a m p l a i n As an F-16 unzips the sky a white-sailed yacht races in like a surrendering rider from the plain of the lake and a boy conjures doves with a piece of cake. Gas pumps plug their fingers in their ears. You can hardly hear a child start to cry. Her father fails to rock her still. Afterwards he remarks this jet guards Plattsburgh Nuclear Base or is on border drill.

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Now she’s mesmerized by a duck & drake teaching oblivious fledglings how to play follow-the-leader. A peace sign spreads in their wake. —greg delanty

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Ve i l Caught in a sun-shower on my way to school, I once took shelter by ducking under a willow. Its branches hung down so low they swept the street. I was stepping through beaded curtains, thick as catkins. The rainwater glittered running down the vines. My books in their slung green satchel stirred like seedlings. Black earth. Moist roots. The bole-mouth oozing tar… I could have waited things out in the candy store, But I was shy. I was a first-born. For years I never knew why those elderly relatives Would look at me that way. They spoke no English. Their coats were heavy. Whatever they’d been through I stepped back out from under the veil of the willow Just as the dew was shining on everything: The houses, the sidewalk. Even the dark Atlantic.

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Ode to the Beekeeper for Stephanie Smith who has taken off her veil and gloves and whispers to the bees in their own language, inspecting the comb-thick frames, blowing just so when one or the other alights on her, if she doesn’t study it first—the veins feeding the wings, the deep ochre shimmy, the singing—just like in the dreams that brought her here in the first place: dream of the queen, dream of the brood chamber, dream of the desiccated world and sifting with her hands the ash and her hands ashen when she awoke, dream of honey in her child’s wound, dream of bees hived in the heart and each wet chamber gone gold. Which is why, first, she put on the veil. And which is why, too, she took it off.

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Here’s a story of two lives lived in response to a crazy time—a time when the Arctic melted and the temperature soared, a time when the planet began to come apart, a time when bee populations suddenly dropped in half. Each story is extreme. They’re not intended as suggestions for how others should live, and I hope the reader won’t feel the need to choose, or reject, either one. Each story is mine, at least in part, for sometimes I think I’ve learned more in the past two years than in all the decades that came before. Some of that education came in the tumult and conflict of my own life, as I helped to build an active resistance to the fossil fuel industry. And some came in the beeyards of my home state, while I carefully watched a very different, very beautiful way of dealing with a malfunctioning modernity. These stories mesh together, I hope: awkwardly right now, but perhaps, with luck, more easily in the time to come. —Bil l McKibben from Oil and Honey: The Education of an Unlikely Activist Times Books (2013)



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The following four poems were written by students in Greg Delanty’s poetry workshop at Saint Michael’s College. The poems are still to be redrafted, but they are worthy of being published in So Little Time. They give a sense of how young people think and feel about our environment. They were written the very week that this book was going to press. o

H a i k u o f t h e Day Growling chainsaws, forests down, trees stripped of bark, sliced into party toothpicks.

—elizabe th kendell

Call from the galactic e n v i r o n m e n ta l p r o t e c t i o n commission, Sep tember 2013 Hello, we’ve found an infestation in sector 6. Yes, they’ve made a real mess of it so far. It’s the third one out, very blue. Really? Just leave them for a few of their decades? Alright, well thank you for your help.

—tristan yerkes

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In Season I prop my gun on a fence post, sight my way across the field where two bucks, stamp, and steam in pale morning. The in-heat doe stands off, watching them circle, slam, and twist in the fight for her. Froth flecks their necks as they back, rear, clash. Sweat gleams on taut flanks under early morning autumn sun. At a moment, they turn broadside and pause. The perfect shot. I size one up and aim. But the crosshairs of my gun cannot settle. My trigger finger locks, my hands clammy and dull against the barrel. And as my resolve jitters, the doe spots me, and the three bolt. I’m still looking through my sight at the trampled grass they left, trying to figure am I glad I lost my shot, and if I really wanted it.

Breaking News A sudden hurricane has devastated Texas. It struck the coast at 3 a.m. Many who call the Lone Star State home are homeless. Impossible to estimate the cost except to say it is in the billions. Torrential rain and CAT-5 winds account for the blackouts. Many Texans blame unholy deeds. Others say the fossil fuel industry will make fossils of us all. The oval office has still to declare a state of emergency. —filip dep tula

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D r i v i n g H o m e At N i g h t Midnight. Outside the car it is 15 below. A foot of new snow. The village is deserted, dark, except for eight street lamps and the light in the window at Jerry’s Garage that says: BEER. The smell of woodsmoke seeps into the car. Judevine, ugliest town in northern Vermont, except maybe East Judevine. Disheveled, wretched, Judevine— my town—is beautiful in the night. It is beautiful because its couple hundred souls have given up their fears, their poverty and worry. For a few hours now they know only the oblivion of sleep and the town lies quiet in their ease. —david budbill



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Th e Tr av e l l e r’s G r a c e Nothing like landing in a foreign city early morning. Preferably in weekday hubbub. Everyone going about their business, lost in themselves, not a thought of how strange, foreign, alien their lives are. How abnormal to think it normal to find ourselves on a spinning ball reeling around a star at thousands of miles per hour from who knows where to who knows where. How outlandish. I’m one of the sacred dead, released from the underworld of the mundane, the banal. Behold the normal. —greg delant y

N o t h i n g G o l d C a n S tay Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf ’s a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay. —robert frost

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Th e E n d o f Fo o t b a l l No one can remember why it happened. No one received any notice or was told where to redeem their tickets. Stadiums, by the sea, were swept in, and fields in the Midwest returned to fields. It was expected citizens would know how to cheer for themselves and read silently, expected wives wouldn’t make too much of this, but children would. Rules, and flags that had been thrown to enforce the rules, were forgotten and held in the same esteem as grass clippings. Groundskeepers rolled Astroturf back into the laboratory, but not anything green by its own nature. Speaking of nature, people spoke more of it. Sows were redeemed and suckled their young in their sties, secure in their own skins. We didn’t have to think of men as lions or bears anymore, but giants and patriots were another story. Cities became known again for their statues and, in one case, for its confluence of rivers. A lot of big men were suddenly out of work, limping and searching for new knees. Living with us now, we needed them to help us remember why we left our families, why we never prayed on Sunday. —gary margolis

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Street Sweeper God scatters where he eats. The sweeper wheels his cart to what falls.

the first God, the God I just left, as if to say God loves you.

The broom assembles a pile. The wind dismantles the pile.

Sometimes he speaks through his dog. Sometimes he doesn’t speak.

God is the messy wind. The pile is the mouthpiece of the wind.

If his mother tongue were “dog” or “frog” or “wind” or “rubbish”

Sometimes the wind is bluster. Sometimes the wind is a mute.

could I learn that language and hear that I was loved?

There is the God who listens. There is the God who speaks.

Or would the answer be something I couldn’t hear.

The God who listens is a gentle liar. The God who speaks is laconic and hard.

The Periodic Table won’t revoke what it has put in the world—

I ask if I’m loved. He points to the graveyard his garden abuts.

Earth metals, non-metals, catalysts. It is God’s slovenly generosity

I clutch his hair. I say Am I loved? He claims his love for me is deep

and is difficult to gather, as the street sweeper knows,

but zealless. Over the garden wall, the God who listens, the neighbour,

as the wind knows, as I know, and God knows. The sweeper smiles at me lovingly

smiles when I ask if I am loved. He points to the God across the wall,

like the silent god, the one with the message I cannot hear. —kathryn maris

A p p r e c i at i o n We treat the god of rain poorly, curse the drizzle, shower, downpour, hailstone, torrent, the cats and dogs, the deluge that cleared the air accompanied by Lightning and his laggard brother, Thunder. You’d think such insults would be too much for the god. Maybe at times they are and he throws a tantrum and catches us without an umbrella at a football match or picnic, no shelter in sight. But this god is soft by nature. Long may he reign. We often forget that without him we’d be minus the multitudinous shades of green, the harvests of Demeter, the gifts, bounty he showers upon us. Bow down now before the god of precipitation, this brooding cumulous god, this weeping god of the sky. —greg delanty

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L e a p i n g Fa l l s And so it was I sheered, Eccentric, into outer space, And tracked with lost paces The forgotten journey of a child, Across the creaking snow, Up the deer-trail

Cold was through and through, Noiseless. Nothing But clouds at my nostrils Moved. Then I uttered a word, Simply a bleak word Slid from the lips. Whereupon

Over the snowdrifted hill Into the secret country Where a boy once found, Routing from ledge to ledge In a tumult at sunrise, The downrush of Leaping Falls.

A topmost icicle came loose And fell, and struck another With a bell-like sound, and Another, and the falls Leapt at their ledges, ringing Down the rocks and on each other

Now the falls lay draped Without motion or sound, Icicles fastened in stories To stillness and rock. At the bottom, A heap of broken icicles Lay dead blue on the snow.

Like an outbreak of bells That rings and ceases. The silence turned around And became silence again. Under the falls on the snow A twigfire of icicles burned pale blue. —galway kinnell

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dede cummings

Clear Cut From above it looks like stubble fields, the harvest scythed to a broad plain of chaff, cornstalks shucked raw, slaughtered. But it’s trees: rainforest the size of Connecticut gone, except the hacked stumps, the stripped and leveled shafts lying as though blown down, or slashed by a vast machine. Who whacked them one by one? Not us. The ant army of the poor (who better to blame) carts logs away,

the crumbs of extinctions scattering behind, the rare white tiger rarer now, while the saw’s dinosaur screech seethes twenty-four seven. Good thing we don’t live here, good thing we only buy the posh armoir, paper aggregated out of pulp, though the sun’s blades spread across obliteration’s stunted vista, the same as in our suburbs. Call it Gouge Meadows. Scourge Acres. And earth was all before them. —daniel tobin

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Th e E x p e d i t i o n As if the cutter ploughed through icing and not ice, such was the troubling sign, though others troubled us: wrenched climates, storms, the wild unseasonable seasons— omens the polls ignored— before our eyes widened at a tonsure of open sea where the frozen pole should be, the ice core melted to a future fifty million years gone, the mists rising in sunlight, our own lives lying down. —daniel tobin



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john willis

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Signs A man hung a sign above the town it said suffering in small letters meaning (I thought) modest suffering This made another man angry he had a sign printed in large letters it said HOPE meaning (I thought) immodest hope Then acres of coffee or cocoa were laid like foreign weather on the fields of maize and rice under the sun the desert waited



Wh i t e Wo r r y

—grace pale y

He mentioned his box of white noise, how he turns on this constant low-level static to drown out local fighter jets on manoeuvre; the news channel permanently on next door; the snarl of chainsaws devouring the sometime forest now become a wood, closing on our back gardens; the siren and hooting street traffic; all the rest of the relentless, varying normal din. At first, I thought how superfluous, how modern such contraptions are, but who am I to talk? Look how I rely on low-level worries: the phone bill, a snub, something I ought to have said— all my precious white noise switched habitually on, the reliable buzz in my head shrouding daily black noise.

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Wo n d e r o f Wo n d e r s A girl cries. Her father beats her, convinces her she’s dumb. She’ll land back in that cave of herself again and again for the rest of her life. Many are like mythical characters blindly returning to tackle whatever invisible monsters brought them down long ago. Maybe the wonder of wonders of being alive—greater even than the lake like a glittering shield, the leaves turning tangerine, bronze, ruby and so infinitely on—is, as yet, we have not undone our world, what with each individual’s struggles, from ruling leader to regular citizen. And should we each manage to wrestle Trauma to the ground and tame him there is Thanatos—his natural father—waiting at the end of it all, the Big-Wig behind all the trouble. Time to give ourselves a pat on the back, thumbs up for not having blown ourselves sky high.

—greg delanty

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Five major worldwide extinction events have struck at biodiversity since the origin of complex animal life some 535 million years ago. Global climate change and other causes, probably including collisions between the Earth and extraterrestrial objects, were responsible for the mass extinctions of the past. Right now we are in the midst of the sixth extinction, this time caused solely by humanity’s transformation of the ecological landscape.

Engraved on the floor of the American Museum of Natural History, New York City.

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Oil Spillage A high-diving gannet opens any point in the water and a circle radiates out. Every point is the center. Tern scissor the gauze of the heat haze, snipping the air from Africa, nest under the sky’s sunset fuchsia blaze. Kids cart a dinghy overhead, reverse from a crab retreating from them as if the film was held and run backward. Bull Rock seems ready to charge out to sea head down, away from danger rather than on the attack. None can escape the dark spreading here.

—greg delanty

rossa cole

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Th e H a r r o w i n g To enter the field without speaking Of the bad years is to trust what is Buried, or at least sleeps. All I bring to dirt Will rise again through green, what survives The first plough. Also: an uncertain fawn Or rabbit taken up and broken by tines Becomes part of the work, held in morning Light, thrown to the dog. We mend most everything Known, marks in a field where we maintain Others were before, also turning earth So that one after another we rely on meaning Nothing, even for what is left behind. In this place, to stay Only as long as it takes; how to enter And allow for leaving without getting caught.

—sophie cabot black



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Th e D r u m m e r s —i.m. Angus Macintyre on 31 March 1995 The first twelve days of April are old March, So from here we proceed with caution For a while. Yet the fritillaries Have already hung magic lanterns From their green javelins, so it must be safe For the roses to shoot again: those roses That Angus mocked yearly because they put out Elaborate mauve feelers before the last frost And paid the penalty, like over-eager students Rushing to judgment too enthusiastically. The chiffchaff ’s back, early this year, And the woodpeckers are drumming away. For some old reason, this morning Those drummers, who normally startle At the first sign of observation And flee in disappointing lifts and swoops Into the distance, hold their stations, Beating a tattoo as if their lives Depended on it. When my arms and neck ache And I move on, they move ahead as well And drum again before me, like scouts With some message too urgent to ignore.

—bernard o’donoghue

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Cantic le of the Sun, A S e c u l a r Ta k e With apologies to Saint Francis of Assisi Chalk it down. Never so much as now should we praise the maker. First, let us praise Brother Sun. He is the light that alights every day. He is the radiant first offspring of the One. Next let us praise Sister Moon, and all the stars like manna showering down on us from the heavens. Let us praise Brother Weather: the siblings Air and Wind, Cloud and Sky who sustain all creatures. What about pure Sister Water? She is so humble she’s hardly noticed. We’d be nothing without her. Likewise Brother Fire? And laud Mother Earth, carrying her bountiful basket overflowing with victuals, fruit and flowers to feed all her offspring: the ant, the cow, the rat, the bee, the vulture, the bird of paradise, the crow, the whale, the camel, the rainbow trout, the platypus; all our dear brothers and sisters. Applaud also all those who work for her sake, especially now we need them more than ever. They know we have so little time, that we’ve made our mother ill. Praise those who say there is hope still, and those who struggle for peace peacefully, not wishing to hurt their fellows. They’ll be crowned in the maker’s goodness before the end which is always now and without end. We could go on forever, but let us finish with praise of Brother Death, for he is of the creator. All those who do not honor him bring him upon us before our time. Yet those who struggle for our mother know another life. May they live on. Yea, I say, chalk it down.

b e n c ava n ag h

—greg delanty

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Prelude Through window glass the garden rests and waits, or comes to itself, a cyclic recognition of air and light, distance, degree of sun, absence or excess of rain, visitations of insects, birds, the temperature of life to nurture or thwart unpredictable as the wavering lens of these panes, sand-and lime-fused, potash-cooled, their seeds and reams hovering, rippling the earth, quickening the trunks of trees. From behind this flickering membrane that holds the blower’s breath the landscape sets about its living business— the curve of vine and leaf brushed by day or night, buds flowering, fragrance and petal-touch, straining to completion or giving up, and in either case, the absent aftermath, all as it should be, after all . . . da n i e l b a r l ow

—christine casson

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Fa r m A i d The colours do not merge according to the sun. The quilt is stable, as I was taught the shapes of shells & stones on beaches my hands explain textures of soils and grasses, and hear what torments the winds carry from dying farms, truckloads of families on the final trips to town. This evening potatoes boiling, salad made, the roast cooling I hear Fr. Jones saying prayers for the corn, and oats and barley in Star of the Sea church in Riverchapel, County Wexford. Returned from our drive we listen to the Farm Aid concert on the radio, children with crayons at my feet dividing vast sheets of paper into enormous Nebraska fields of soy beans and corn. Immortal farm families, enormous tombs on each horizon, a wailing absence of young voices. —eamonn wall



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Tu r b u l e n c e

Carrot

When a disembodied voice asks you to fasten yourself, it is an order, not a question. Resign to your fate or be wrestled to the floor: Even though you never believed in God to begin with, you, sweet passenger, must have faith in weather, if nothing else — in the electricity that cups you in the palm of its hand.

Before you invented angels, I was a flaming sword plunged into the earth. Before there were ploughshares I fed armies of innocents. Before there were forges I was forged, with rain, with copper, with feces. The birds carried my seeds like prophecies. You cannot eat me without reading the urgent words I was grown to teach you.

for Courtney —benjamin aleshire

for Danielle —benjamin aleshire



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A Quiet Afternoon Generously donated for our use By an unknown benefactor Who made sure the sky will be blue, The breeze mild and caressing As we lie in the shade of a tree, Our eyelids heavy, our yawns Lengthening and lengthening In the stillness of the afternoon,

w i l l ow o ’ f e r a l

As the last leaf falls quiet And time itself comes to a stop With its brightly-colored circus wagons Far from any village or town. Every card in the caravan lying face down, Only a horse in a field permitted To flick his tail and a woman Sunbathing in the nude to swat a fly. —charles simic 182

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Wh i t e O u t The day gets away from me. Nothing done and it’s lunchtime, rushing to a meeting, held up by white-out traffic, the snow calling a halt to the daily life-and-death tedium: committees, bills, email, post. If we croaked today what difference would it make? I give up, tell myself to wait till the traffic eases off. Park. Drop into a shop. Watch the snow erase the world. It is good to throw your hat at it all, not to turn up, be nothing, no one, watch the snow fall, turn to a blank page. —greg delanty

declan mcc abe



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R e s i s ta n c e You are still here. It is nightfall. From the window you can see the leaves are no longer leaves but black sponges, damp against the draining sky. You are safe here. The pines are a sturdy fortress against the strong north wind. They move constantly like strange, brooding echoes. The house sits firmly in the overgrowth of centuries.

It is fine here. You imagine mice, worms, squirrels and hundreds of watching insects while the dark comes down like a lid. The woods wait—cave upon cave of shadow and silence. You can be sure here. There is no reason to believe that at any moment it will all come apart, burst into switchblades, bright and ready to cut, but you do.

—sharon webster

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The ultimate test of man’s conscience may be his willingness to sacrifice something today for future generations whose words of thanks will not be heard. —gay l or d nelson

mariana cook



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Et In Arcadia EGo To shake off the plodding tedium of the road, we took to the fields. After clambering gingerly over barbed-wire fences and deep, booby-trapped ditches, we emerged scratched and disheveled on the very edge of a spectacular valley, nestling between Rathcooney and Mayfield. A glorious, forgotten wilderness In which Artemis herself would have revelled. A riot of unrestrained bramble, whitethorn, grey nettle, oxeye daisy, thistle, loosestrife, bindweed, bluebell, eyebright, red valerian, speedwell, foxglove, deadly nightshade, milkwort, creeping buttercup, meadow sweet, meadow rue and thick, waist-high grasses cheerfully ruffled and unruffled by an impish breeze. At its bottom a dark stream hurried along bridged by a fallen oak, across which ants were carrying dead and dismembered insects on small stygian errands. —gerry murphy

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E u c a ly p t u s Two years the eucalyptus stood dead in its place, the death angel hesitant to abandon it. I touch the bark, sorrow rising as a sap within me. The tree was inspiration, its yielding scent, the quivering of its leaves, its housing arms for a swarm of bees, crossroads for the snattering of goldfinch, secret crannies for the treecreepers, the flycatchers. Its death was unspectacular, freezing where it stood through a desperate winter. And holding on, suffering the indignities of despoliation. Skin shedding in long, dun scabs, spoiling the lawn. Till I knew the tree’s love had been an intensity I cherished for all those years. Chainsaw, finally, against its flesh was a caress, my guiding it to its fall—the slow creak of its splitting, the splintering, like stained-glass, of its lesser branches, the awful thump of its trunk against solid ground—all this was an embrace, a farewell, an asking for forgiveness. The angel left with a breathing sigh, and the emptiness remaining that stood up against the sky was a spirit lifted into air and held close after the flesh’s long dormition. —john f. deane



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Written on the margin o f S a i n t G a l l ’s m a n u s c r i p t, 904 ad From a tree cluster, a blackbird sings to me — I’ve got to tell you— over my ink-winged book leaves. Yes, the bird sings to me. A silver-cloaked cuckoo sings too, — sweet — from his briary fortress. The maker is good to me, a scribe in the thick of woods. Translated from the Irish by Greg Delanty

mariana cook

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E v e n t h e At h e i s t s S a n g for the Solace of Song Later tonight it’s to turn cold, the old sudden sharp iceberg cold of New England. Crickets, cicadas, grasshoppers and frogs play on. What their song and wing-music are saying I can’t say, except they must know already that the ice has gashed a gaping hole in the hull of Indian Summer and they are the quartet that comes out on deck and plays away as the great ship goes down. We listen quietly from our deck’s lifeboat. Play on brave, noble souls. Play on. Nearer, my God, to thee. Nearer to thee. —greg delanty



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Th e S h i p o f B i r t h For months your crib is docked waiting for you, laden with a shower of gifts: hand-knit boots with suede soles, mounting drifts of rompers, bibs, hats and a slew of other offerings laid on your ship of birth with the ark story embroidered all about. In this berth the creatures have mostly mirth— ful faces: the cachinnating chickadees, the stout stoat, the grinning elephant trunk-bailing the boat, the droll owl, the odd rainbow trout, the one-humped camel you might think is pregnant on its back, the polar bear yodeling upon a melting green berg, the avuncular ant, not to speak of the circus of unrecorded creatures on your kid attire. Is this saying, unbeknownst to us, that we gather around the baby The Great Circus of the Earth: the flying hippopotamus, the fetus-like manatee, the dork stork, the delirious giraffe, not just for a sappy laugh, but to illuminate their dearth and our sapien dodo-ing as we fish-mouth sorry sorrysorrysorrysorrysorrysorry?



Our little lambkin, waxwing, luckling, all the cordial choir are Noah-calling you now: the lovelice, the leech of paradise, the how-now-down-cow, the Forever Gone Bird, the Dolly sheep, the flying kiwi, the crying with laughter jackass, the pronghorn, the bristleless porcupine, the schizophrenic platypus, the liquorice-black crow, the rhinoceros: that ancestor of the unicorn with an overgrown thorn-horn. Listen, the horns, the horns are blowing, trumpeting you, our dear humacorn, beckoning you onto the ark out of your first watery dark. ‘Hurry now, Hurry now,’ baritones the polar bear. ‘Our icebergs are melting out here.’ ‘Quick Quick,’ the duck sections quack. ‘Darn, darn,’ basso-bleats the goat, stomping time with his hoof as the chorus raises the roof: ‘All aboard, all aboard, our poor wee bairn.’ —greg delanty

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M o n a r c h B u t t e r f ly Especially for Bill McKibben and 350.org

Another, another and another flutters through America. I wish there were a monarch version of On The Road recording each flaglet’s psychedelic trip of endurance, each a watermark of the soul held to light, antique symbol. These flames, lighting off wing-veins of coal, have waited long enough to wing-sign “Take a leaf from us, laying ourselves down in a dark wood, myriads all together, souls not leaving the body at death, but emerging into life, a single flame blazing up from our teeming underworld. Emerge from your furled chrysalis, become us all, become the humonarch. —greg delanty

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Our comforting sense of the permanence of our natural world, our

confidence that it will change gradually and imperceptibly if at all, is the result of a subtly-warped perspective. Changes that can affect us can happen in our lifetime in our world—not just changes like

wars but bigger and more sweeping events. I believe that without recognizing it we have already stepped over the threshold of such a

change; that we are at the end of nature. By the end of nature I do

not mean the end of the world. The rain will still fall and the sun shine, though differently than before. When I say “nature,” I mean a certain set of human ideas about the world and our place in it.

—Bil l McKibben from The End of Nature Random House (2006)



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Envoy by Bill McKibben o

T

he movement to slow the rapid warming of our home planet has sunk serious and deep roots in Vermont. Partly that’s because we have good scientists—but in fact more important

science has been done elsewhere, in the great metropolitan universities. More it’s because we have

strong connections: strong connections to the natural world around us and strong connections to each other. Most people who read this book, of course, will be from other places. Even the great Vermont poet

Greg Delanty, who contributes the bulk of the writing in this extraordinary volume, came here, like many of

Vermont’s writers, from away. But in this place of field and forest, small enough in scale, with the pastoral and the raw wild backing up against each other, so many writers and photographers have found a reassuring sense of the turning of the wheel, the passing of one season into the next.

That seamless transition, of course, is what we’ve now sundered. Timelessness, even in Vermont, is

giving way to time. As we heat the planet, inexorable and profound change rips through our place; none of

us were left untouched, at least psychologically, by Hurricane Irene, the ur-storm of the global warming era, which dumped a record cargo of rain on the Green Mountains.

And so our appreciation of the natural turns into the urgent need to fight for its future, which is where

our connection to each other comes in. Greg Delanty, John Elder, and many of the others featured in this

book were on the first great climate march in US history, six days along the west side of Vermont in 2006. We entered Burlington a thousand strong, and not long after 350.org began spreading that same message to every corner of the planet.

Those connections are our only hope: our connections back to the land that we love, and our horizontal

connections to our fellows. There is no way to fight climate change one by one, only as a movement. And

now that movement has a book of poems, photographs and prose. Perfect for reading if you happen to, say, find yourself in jail.

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SHADIA FAYNE WOOD

Greg Delanty’s Collected Poems 1986-2006 is out from the Oxford Poet’s series of Carcanet Press. Recent books are: The Greek Anthology, Book XVII (Carcanet Press and due from LSU Press), Loosestrife (Fomite Press, 2011), The Ship of Birth (Carcanet Press, LSU 2006), The Blind Stitch (Carcanet Press, LSU Press, 2003) and The Hellbox (Oxford University Press, 1998). He edited (with Michael Matto) The Word Exchange, Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation, (WW Norton, 2010). He has received many awards, most recently a Guggenheim for poetry. His poems are widely anthologized and have been broadcast on The Writer’s Almanac. He is the Poet-In-Residence at Saint Michael’s College, Vermont; an environmental activist with 350.org. He lives in Vermont. John Elder specializes in American nature writing and pastoral literature, as well as Basho and the Haiku Tradition, contemporary poetry, and environmental studies. He has received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, a Fulbright Senior Research Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His most recent books include Reading the Mountains of Home (Harvard University Press, 1998), The Frog Run (Milkweed Editions, 2002).

Benjamin Aleshire is an artist based in Louisiana and Vermont. His writing has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Seven Days, and many other publications. His first book, Dropped Apples, was funded through a grant from the VT Arts Council. Ben is currently at work as a puppeteer for the New Orleans Fringe Festival.

Sherman Joseph Alexie, Jr. is a poet, writer, and filmmaker. Much of his writing draws on his experiences as a Native American growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation. His first novel was Reservation Blues. His first young adult novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a PartTime Indian, is a semi-autobiographical novel that won the 2007 U.S. National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. His collection of short stories and poems, entitled War Dances, won the 2010 PEN/ Faulkner Award for Fiction. Julia Alvarez has been practicing the craft of writing for over forty years. She has brought a variety of work to readers of all ages, including novels, picture books, novels for middle readers and young adults; collections of poetry, and most recently A Wedding in Haiti. With her husband, Bill Eichner, she founded Alta Gracia, a sustainable farm and literacy center in her native Dominican Republic. Currently, she is a writer in residence at Middlebury College in Vermont. Judith Aronson has a BA in American Studies from the University of Michigan, and from Yale University, an MA in City Planning, and an MFA in Graphic Design. For three years in the 1970s she travelled and worked in South East Asia, including a year assisting the photographer Hans Hoefer, director of the Insight Guides. She is a Professor in the Communications Department at Simmons College. In 2010, a book of Aronson’s portraits of writers and artists, Likenesses: With the Sitters Writing About One Another, was published by Carcanet Press.

Valerie S. Banschbach, Ph.D., is a professor of biology at Saint Michael’s College in Vermont, where she researches the use of ants as bioindicators of ecosystem health. Dr. Banschbach’s Fulbright project 196

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at Navdanya’s Farm in Uttarakhand, India, will extend her program of research on ants as bioindicators to agricultural systems. David Barber ’s most recent collection is Wonder Cabinet (Northwestern University Press, 2006). He is poetry editor of the Atlantic.

Daniel Barlow is a Vermont writer, photographer and publisher. He is the co-founder of Green Mountain Graveyards, an art project centered around Vermont cemeteries, and the co-publisher of the Trees & Hills comics group. Barlow lives in Montpelier, Vermont.

Sophie Cabot Black has two poetry collections: The Misunderstanding of Nature, which received the Poetry Society of America’s First Book Award, and The Descent, which received the 2005 Connecticut Book Award, and most recently, The Exchange. Her poetry has appeared in numerous magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review. Robert Bly’s books of poetry include The Night Abraham Called to the Stars and My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy. His awards include the National Book Award for poetry and two Guggenheims. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Antonello Borra, teaches Italian at the University of Vermont. His volumes of poetry are Frammenti di tormenti (prima parte) (Longo: 2000), Frammenti di tormenti (seconda parte) (Lietocolle: 2006), Alfabestiario (Lietocolle: 2009), and the two illustrated, bilingual Alphabetabestiario (Fomite: 2011) and Alfabestiario (Fomite: 2013). Translations of his poetry appeared in English, Catalan, and are being prepared in German.

Steven Brock is a photographer and bookbinder based in San Francisco. His award winning black and white portraits of villagers from a remote town in the Peruvian Andes have been published in The New York Times and The New Yorker magazine. David Budbill has published three books of poems with Copper Canyon Press: Moment to Moment (1999), While We’ve Still Got Feet (2005)

ANGELA JANE EVANCIE

Contributors

and Happy Life (2011). He lives in the southwest corner of Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom.

Annie Tiberio Cameron, of Montpelier, is a fine art photographer. Her background in science supports her passion for photography, inspiring images revealing her world view. Teaching photography since 1978 has honed her skills and contributed to shaping her vision with an impressionistic and painterly style, often an abstract or visual brushstroke of nature. Her work is at www.anniecameronphotography.com Expressing her vision through the magic of lenses fascinates and absorbs her.

Patty Carpenter studied Jazz at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst with the great Archie Shepp and Max Roach. Many of the themes of Patty’s music and activism are reflections of her decade living on a communal farm, including her passionate involvement in the anti-nuclear, peace, and environmental movements. Patty and her husband, Charles, have a band called the Dysfunctional Family Jazz Band.

Hayden Carruth (1921–2008) published his first collection of poems, The Crow and the Heart, in 1959. He published more than thirty books, including Toward the Distant Islands: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2006) and Doctor Jazz: Poems 1996-2000 (2001). Carruth lived in Vermont for many years before residing in Munnsville, New York, with his wife, the poet Joe-Anne McLaughlin Carruth. Christine Casson is the author of After the First World, a book of poems (Star Cloud Press, 2008). Her work has appeared in Agenda (England), Stand (England), The Dalhousie Review, DoubleTake, Natural Bridge, and Alabama Literary Review, among others, and in many anthologies. She is Writer in Residence at Emerson College. Ben Cavanagh is a photographer in Ottawa who owns and operates Ottawa People Pictures. His bike photos will be featured in a book of poems, Cycling in Plato’s Cave, due out in 2014 from Fomite Press in Burlington, Vermont.

David Cavanagh’s third book, Straddle, is due out from Salmon Poetry of Ireland in 2014. Cycling in Plato’s Cave, a book of bicycle-related poems, is also forthcoming in 2014 from Fomite Press of Burlington, Vermont. Earlier collections include Falling Body and The Middleman, both published by Salmon Poetry. David lives in Burlington and works at Johnson State College. Michael Coffey is author of poetry collections Elemenopy and 87 North, and the editor (with Terry Golway) of The Irish in America. Billy Collins has published eleven collections of poetry. His latest book, Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems 2003–2013, was released in October 2013. He is a Distinguished Professor of English at Lehman College of the City University of New York and Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Winter Park Institute at Rollins College. He was appointed United States Poet Laureate 2001–2003.

Mariana Cook is a photographer who uses black-and-white film and prints on silver gelatin paper. Ten books of her work have been published, including the best-selling Fathers and Daughters (1994) and the

most recent, Justice: Faces of the Human Rights Revolution (2013). Stone Walls: Personal Boundaries was her first book of landscapes that was released in 2011. Her photographs are held in both private and museum collections. She is the last protégée of Ansel Adams.

Wyn Cooper is the author of four books of poems, most recently Chaos is the New Calm (BOA Editions, 2010), and Postcards from the Interior (BOA Editions, 2005). His poems appear in more than 25 anthologies of contemporary poetry and more than 100 magazines. He has written song lyrics for Sheryl Crow, Madison Smartt Bell, and David Broza. He works as a freelance editor from his home in Vermont. Ralph Culver arrived in Vermont from Pittsburgh in 1970 to study writing and literature at Goddard College and realized he had found home. His awards include a creation grant in poetry from the Vermont Arts Council and the 2012 Anabiosis Press Chapbook Prize for his highly praised collection Both Distances (2013). David Curzon is the author of poetry books and midrash, the editor of two anthologies of poetry, and translator of the poems of Eustache Deschamps, Anna Kamienska, and others. John F. Deane was born on Achill Island 1943. He was shortlisted for both the T.S.Eliot prize and The Irish Times Poetry Now Award. His recent poetry collections are Eye of the Hare (Carcanet, 2011) and Snow falling on Chestnut Hill: New & Selected Poems (Carcanet, 2012). He is editor of Poetry Ireland Review.

Chard deNiord is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Night Mowing (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005) and The Double Truth (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011). He is also the author of a book of interviews with senior American poets (Galway Kinnell, Lucille Clifton, Robert Bly, Ruth Stone, Donald Hall, Jack Gilbert, and Maxine Kumin) titled Sad Friends, Drowned Lovers, Stapled Songs (Marick Press, 2012). He lives in Putney, Vermont with his wife, Liz. Caitlin Doyle’s poems, essays, and book reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in The Atlantic, The Boston Review, The Threepenny Review, Black Warrior Review, Best New Poets 2009, Blackbird, and others. She has taught poetry as the Writer-In-Residence at St. Albans School, as a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Boston University, and as the Emerging Writer-In-Residence at Penn State University. John Engels (1931–2007) grew up in South Bend, Indiana. He earned an AB in English from the University of Notre Dame, served in the US Navy for three years, attended University College, Dublin, and received an MFA from the University of Iowa. Engels published over ten collections of poetry and was a longtime teacher at St. Michael’s College in Colchester, Vermont.

David Ferry’s latest books are Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2012), winner of the National Book Award for Poetry, 2012; and On This Side of the River (Waywiser Press, UK, 2012). In 2011 he was awarded the Ruth Lilly Ward for lifetime achievement, from the Poetry Foundation. s o

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Johanna Gardener is a longtime Vermonter and still resides in her childhood home in Newfane, Vermont, with her family. She teaches French at The Grammar School in Putney, Vermont.

Ross Gay was born in Youngstown, Ohio, and grew up just outside of Philadelphia. He is the author of two books of poems: Against Which (CavanKerry Press, 2006) and Bringing the Shovel Down (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011). Ross is also a founding member of the Bloomington Community Orchard, a publicly owned, volunteer-run, freefruit, organic orchard. He teaches in the M.F.A. program at Indiana University and in Drew University’s Low-Residency MFA program. Brian Geerlings is a freelance photographer based in Salem, Oregon.

Eamon Grennan
is the author of more than ten collections of poetry, He has also written a book of essays, Facing the Music: Irish Poetry in the 20th Century (1999). He won the PEN Award for poetry in translation for Selected Poems of Giacomo Leopardi (1997), and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets for Still Life with Waterfall (2002). Grennan was the Dexter M. Ferry Jr. Professor of English at Vassar College until his retirement in 2004. Catherine Dianich Gruver is a social documentary photographer living in Southern Vermont. She has been the recipient of established artist fellowships and awards, and has exhibited nationally. Her body of work titled, “At Home,” in which she documented her family experience, has shaped and informed all subsequent work. Amelia Hancock (1961-2013), also known as Amelia X, was a talented photographer and artist who worked in many mediums, including drawing, painting, collage and sculpture. A retrospective of her work is planned for 2014 in Brattleboro, Vermont. Seamus Heaney (13 April 1939–30 August 2013), born in Northern Ireland, was an Irish poet, playwright, translator and lecturer, and the recipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Ken Hebson hit the road in the mid-sixties, taught in Spain, did Europe by motorcycle, drove from Morocco to Egypt in a VW bus, and hitched and hiked as far as Kabul. He recently published a chapbook, South from Istanbul. Stephen Heron is a retired newspaper editor living in Dublin, Ireland. As a photographer, his work is focused on wildlife and the botanical world. Jerry Hiam has been designing, restoring, and building homes in New England since 1976. Educated at New England College, New Hampshire Technical Institute, and the Boston Architectural Center, he designs and builds energy-efficient custom homes from his office in Putney, Vermont, when he is not out taking photographs.

Jane Hirshfield is the author of seven award-winning poetry books, most recently Come, Thief (Knopf, 2011), a now-classic collection of essays, Nine Gates (HarperCollins, 1997) and four collections bringing forward world poets of the past. Her work appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Orion, Poetry, and seven editions of The Best American Po198

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etry. A current Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, she received the 2012 Donald Hall-Jane Kenyon Award in American Poetry.

Gail Holst-Warhaft was born in Australia and lives in Ithaca, New York. Among her many publications are Road to Rembetika (1975, 4th edition 2006), Theodorakis: Myth and Politics in Modern Greek Music (Hakkert, Amsterdam, 1980), Dangerous Voices: Women’s Laments and Greek Literature (Routledge, 1992), The Cue for Passion: Grief and its Political Uses (Harvard, 2000), I Had Three Lives: Selected Poems of Mikis Theodorakis (Livanis, 2005), and Penelope’s Confession (poems, Cosmos, 2007), Losing Paradise (Ashgate, 2010). Her poems and translations of Greek poetry have appeared in journals in the US, the UK, Australia and Greece. Peter Hope served as Program Director at the Vermont Institute of Natural Science for three years where he also served as a photographer for VINS’s publications. He got his M.S. in Botany at the University of Vermont and has been teaching at St. Michael’s College since 1992. Peter served as the President of the Vermont Botanical and Bird Club.

Didi Jackson ’s poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Passages North, Poetry South, and Sierra Nevada Review among other publications. She divides her time between Vermont and Florida.

Major Jackson is the author of three collections of poetry: Holding Company (2010, Norton), Hoops (2006, Norton), and Leaving Saturn (2002, University of Georgia Press). Hoops was selected as a finalist for a NAACP Image Award in the category of Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry, and Leaving Saturn was awarded the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry. Jackson is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, and other awards. He lives in South Burlington, Vermont, where he is the Richard A. Dennis Professor at University of Vermont. He serves as the Poetry Editor of the Harvard Review. George Kalogeris teaches humanities and literature at Boston University and at Suffolk University in Boston, Massachusetts. He recently published a book of poems based on the notebooks of Albert Camus entitled Camus: Carnets (Pressed Wafer). Kalogeris received a masters degree in creative writing from Boston University. He completed his Ph.D. studies in comparative literature at the University Professors Program, Boston University; his doctoral thesis was entitled “Folk Songs and Foreign Influences in Modern Greek Poetry: the Growth of the Demotic Tradition.” His poems have appeared in Agni, Harvard Review, and Ploughshares.

Galway Kinnell was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1927. He is a former MacArthur Fellow and State Poet of Vermont, and his Selected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1982. His many books of poetry include The Book of Nightmares, Mortal Acts, Mortal Words, The Past, A New Selected Poems, and, most recently, Strong Is Your Hold. For many years he was the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Creative Writing at New York University. In 2010 he was given the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. He lives in Sheffield, Vermont.

Leland Kinsey was born and raised on a farm in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, where his ancestors settled in the early 1800s. He has conducted writing workshops for the Vermont Arts Council and the Children’s Literacy Foundation at over one hundred schools in New Hampshire and Vermont. He has published six collections of poetry, including In the Rain Shadow (University Press of New England, 2004) Sledding on Hospital Hill (Godine, 2003) and, most recently, The Immigrant’s Contract (Godine, 2006). He lives near the Canadian border with his wife and three children.

Maxine Kumin was born in Philadelphia in 1925. She received her BA and MA from Radcliffe College. She has published numerous books of poetry including Where I Live: New & Selected Poems 1990-2010 (W. W. Norton, 2010), Still to Mow (2009), Jack (2003), The Long Marriage (2003), Bringing Together (2003), Connecting the Dots (1996), Looking for Luck (1992), Nurture (1989), The Long Approach (1986), Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief (1982), House, Bridge, Fountain, Gate (1975), and Up Country: Poems of New England (1972) for which she received the Pulitzer Prize. She has received the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern Poetry, an American Academy of Arts and Letters award and many others, along with fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and the National Council on the Arts. She has served as Poet Laureate of the United States, Poet Laureate of New Hampshire, and is a former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She lives in New Hampshire. Adrie Kusserow is Professor of Anthropology at St Michael’s College in Colchester, Vermont. She has two books of poems published by BOA Editions, Ltd.: Hunting Down the Monk (2002) and Refuge (2013).

Sydney Lea is Poet Laureate of Vermont. His tenth collection of poems, I Was Thinking of Beauty, is now available from Four Way Books. His collaborative book with Fleda Brown, Growing Old in Poetry: Two Poets, Two Lives, has now been issued in e-book format by Autumn House Press, and Skyhorse Publishing has just published A North Country Life: Tales of Woodsmen, Waters and Wildlife.

Lesle Lewis’s books include Small Boat (winner of the 2002 Iowa Poetry Prize), Landscapes I & II (Alice James Books, 2006), lie down too (2011, winner of Beatrice Hawley Award) and the chapbook, It’s Rothko in Winter or Belgium (Factory Hollow Press, 2012). Her next collection, A Boot’s a Boot, is forthcoming in 2014. She has had poems appear in numerous journals. Lesle is a Professor of Creative Writing at Landmark College and she lives in New Hampshire. Buff Lindau is director of marketing at Saint Michael’s College in Vermont. She earned a Ph.D. from the University of South Carolina where she studied with James Dickey and Morse Peckham, and wrote one of the earliest women’s studies dissertations (1974). Her work has appeared in Bridges: A Jewish Feminist Journal, Front Range Review, The Alembic, and The Onion River Review. She lives in Burlington, Vermont. Neil Louie is a freelance photographer from Chilliwack, British Columbia, and a graduate of the VAN Arts College Photography Program

in Vancouver. Neil’s band, Nadlehwhuten, is within the BC First Nations community. His new photography business is NPLphotography.

Evie Lovett has photographed children at play, patients in a rural hospital in Rwanda, Muslim women in Paris, and North American Indian Days on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana. Her exhibition of photographs and audio, Backstage at the Rainbow Cattle Co.: The Drag Queens of Dummerston, Vermont, is currently making a fourteen-county Vermont tour with the Vermont Folklife Center and the Vermont Community Foundation. Fred Marchant is the author of four books of poetry. His first book was Tipping Point and his most recent was The Looking House (Graywolf Press). He has co-translated (with Nguyen Ba Chung) From a Corner of My Yard, by Tran Dang Khoa; and edited Another World Instead: The Early Poems of William Stafford, 1937-1947. He is the Founding Director of the Creative Writing Program, and the Poetry Center at Suffolk University in Boston.

Gary Margolis, Ph.D., is Emeritus Executive Director of College Mental Health Services and Associate Professor of English and American Literatures (part-time) at Middlebury College. His third book, Fire in the Orchard, was nominated for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. His new book of poems, Raking the Winter Leaves: New and Selected Poems, is forthcoming from Baughan Press.

Kathryn Maris, a poet from New York City who now lives in London, is the author of The Book of Jobs (Four Way Books, 2006) and God Loves You (Seren, 2013). She has won a Pushcart Prize, an Academy of American Poets award, and fellowships from Yaddo and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Declan McCabe is an ecologist in the Biology Department of Saint Michael’s College. He teaches ecology, evolution, and general biology. Declan’s primary research interests revolve around the invertebrate communities of Lake Champlain and its tributaries. When not studying the insects of Vermont’s streams and lakes, he enjoys photographing all things biological.

Thomas McCarthy was born at Cappoquin, Co. Waterford. Educated at University College Cork., he was the winner of the Patrick Kavanagh Award, 1977, Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize, 1980, and O’Shaughnessy Poetry Prize, 1991. He was a visiting Professor of English at Macalester College, Minnesota, between 1994–95. He works as a librarian in Cork. His last collection of poems was The Last Geraldine Officer (2009).

Ellen McCulloch-Lovell is in her tenth year as president of Marlboro College in Vermont. Her book of poems, Gone, was published in 2010 by Janus Press and she earned her MFA in Writing from Warren Wilson College in 2012. Ellen began her career as executive director of the Vermont Arts Council, then spent decades in Washington, DC, as Senator Leahy’s Chief of Staff, director of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, Deputy Assistant to President Clinton and Advisor to the First Lady, and as founding director of the Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress. s o l i t t l e t i m e 199

Paul McLoughlin has published four collections of poetry: What Certainty Is Like (Smith Doorstop, 1998), What Moves Moves (2004), Forgetting To Come In (2007), and The Road To Murreigh (2010), all with Shoestring Press. Most recently he has edited and introduced Brian Jones: New & Selected Poems (Shoestring Press, 2013). Born in London of Irish parents, he also plays jazz saxophones and flute.

Andrew McNeillie was born in North Wales and educated at Magdalen College, Oxford. He is founding editor of the magazine Archipelago, published by the Clutag Press. His sixth collection of poems, Winter Moorings, is due out early in 2014. Gerry Murphy was born in Cork and still lives there. His latest books are End of Part One, New and Selected Poems (Dedalus, 2006) and My Flirtation With International Socialism (Dedalus, 2010).

Bernard O’Donoghue was born in County Cork in 1945, and he still spends part of the year there. He has lived in England since 1962, and since 1965 in Oxford where he is now an Emeritus Fellow in English at Wadham College. He has published five volumes of poems with Gallery Press or Chatto and Windus, and his Selected Poems was published by Faber in 2008. His most recent poetry-collection was Farmers Cross (Faber, 2011). He has translated Sir Gawain and the Green Knight inPenguin Classics, and he is translating Piers Plowman for Faber. He has written criticism on medieval European love poetry and on Seamus Heaney, and he is currently preparing Selections from Chaucer for Faber.

Willow O’Feral is a filmmaker and photographer from Northern California, now living in Brooklyn. Willow holds a Bachelor’s degree in French and Film/Video from Marlboro College in Vermont. She is currently in pre-production for a documentary feature about women’s self-defense on Native American reservations across the US & Canada.

Mary Oliver was born in Ohio in 1935. Oliver’s first collection of poems, No Voyage and Other Poems, was published in 1963, when she was twenty-eight Her honors include a National Book Award, Pulitzer Prize, an American Academy of Arts & Letters Award, a Lannan Literary Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Oliver held the Catharine Osgood Foster Chair for Distinguished Teaching at Bennington College until 2001. Liam Ó Muirthile’s latest collection of poems is An Fuíoll Feá/Rogha Dánta—Wood Cuttings/New and Selected Poems (Cois Life 2013). A bilingual collection, it includes a CD of new poems in both Irish and English.

Mark Ostow is a portrait photographer based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He shoots for many national publications and advertising campaigns. When not shooting, he often plays chess at a small coffeebar he owns in Porter Square, Cambridge, called Café Zing.

Grace Paley (1922-2007) was born in the Bronx to immigrant parents. In 1980 she was elected to the National Academy of Arts and Letters. Her Collected Stories, published in 1994, was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. From 2003-2007 she served as Vermont Poet Laureate. She died at her home in Thetford, Vermont. 200 s o l i t t l e t i m e

Jay Parini is a poet and novelist teaching at Middlebury College where he chairs the program in creative writing. His most recent volume of poetry was The Art of Subtraction: New and Selected Poems.

Samantha Perrelli is a recent graduate of Vermont College of Fine Arts where she received her Masters in Visual Arts. Verandah Porche works as a poet-in-residence, performer and writing partner. Based in rural Vermont since 1968, she has published Sudden Eden (Verdant Books), The Body’s Symmetry (Harper and Row) and Glancing Off (See Through Books).The Vermont Arts Council presented her with its Award of Merit in 1998, and Marlboro College gave her an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters in 2012. Adrienne Rich
(1929–2012) was an American poet, essayist and feminist. She was one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century.

Maurice Riordan’s The Water Stealer (Faber) was published in 2013. His previous book, The Holy Land, received the Michael Hartnett Award in 2007. Among his other books are Floods and A Word from the Loki. He has edited several anthologies, including A Quark for Mister Mark, and an upcoming selection of early Irish lyrics, The Finest Music. Born in Lisgoold, Co. Cork, he lives in London and is editor of Poetry Review.

Marjorie Ryerson is an award-winning author of both photography and non-fiction books, as well as a published poet. Her art photography book, Water Music, has won both national and international recognition. Marjorie serves on the Selectboard in Randolph, Vermont, as well as being recently appoiknted by Governor Shumlin as Vermont State Representative from Randolph. She teaches poetry each spring at Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf writing campus and holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Stephen Sandy’s books of poetry include The Thread, New and Selected Poems (1998), Black Box (1999), Octave A Poem in Eight Parts (2002), Weathers Permitting (2005), and Overlook (2010). Sandy held NEA and Merrill Foundation fellowships and was a Lannan Senior Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He received an award for excellence in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2006. Charles Simic is a poet, essayist, and translator. He has published some twenty collections of poetry, six books of essays, a memoir, and numerous translations. He is the recipient of many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin Prize, and a MacArthur Fellowship. Simic was appointed the fifteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. His New and Selected Poems: 1962–2012 was published in March 2013. Tracy K. Smith is an African-American poet and educator. She has published three collections of poetry. Her collection, Life on Mars, won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

William Stafford was born in Hutchinson, Kansas, in 1914. He taught for many years at Lewis and Clark College. His first major collection of poems, Traveling Through the Dark, was published when Stafford was

forty-eight. He went on to publish more than sixty-five volumes of poetry and prose. In 1970, he was named U.S. Poet Laureate.

Zachary Stephens has worked as staff and freelance photographer for newspapers and magazines. He was the photo editor at the Brattleboro Reformer, the program director at the In-Sight Photography Project, and an instructor at Landmark College. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Vermont Life Magazine, The Boston Globe, The Boston Herald, USA Today and more. Barry Sternlieb is the author of four chapbooks, the latest of which, Winter Crows, won the 2008 Codhill Press Poetry Prize. His work appears in Poetry, The Southern Review, Sewanee Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Gettysburg Review, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, and others. He is the recipient of a 2004 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship in Poetry, and also edits Mad River Press. Ruth Stone was born in Roanoke, Virginia, in 1915. She moved to Goshen, Vermont, in the 1950s where she lived for the rest of her life until her death in November, 2011. During her lifetime, Ruth served as Vermont Poet Laureate, and published over twelve collections of poetry including In the Next Galaxy (Copper Canyon, 2002), Ordinary Words (Paris Press, 2000), and In the Dark (Copper Canyon, 2007).

Ross Thurber is a farmer and poet. He lives and works on Lilac Ridge Farm with his family in the foothills of the southern Green Mountains. Daniel Tobin is the author of six books of poems: Where the World is Made, Double Life, The Narrows, Second Things, Belated Heavens (winner of the Massachusetts Book Award in Poetry, 2011), and The Net (Four Way Books, 2014). His newest, From Nothing, is forthcoming from Four Way Books in 2016. His awards include the “The Discovery/The Nation Award,” The Robert Penn Warren Award, the Robert Frost Fellowship, the Katherine Bakeless Nason Prize, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. Rachel Trousdale is an associate professor of English at Agnes Scott College and Northeastern University. Her poems and reviews have appeared in Literary Imagination, The Atlanta Review, The Yale Review, The Southern Poetry Anthology, and many other places. Mark Unrau is a photographer by trade and nomad by blood. Raised Mennonite in a tobacco farming community in Ontario, Mark has spent much of his time on the land and in the controversy surrounding tobacco. Spiritual but not religious, a dissident and a pragmatist, he discovered photography as a way to explore and challenge his perceptions and share them with the world. Mark lives in Banff, Alberta, where he operates the Photography School of the Rockies. Jean Valentine was born in Chicago, earned her B.A. from Radcliffe College, and has lived most of her life in New York City. She won the Yale Younger Poets Award for her first book, Dream Barker, in 1965. Her eleventh book of poetry is Break the Glass, published by Copper Canyon Press in 2010.

Ellen Bryant Voigt
is the author of eight collections of poetry, most recently Headwaters (W.W. Norton & Co., 2013), and Messenger: New and Selected Poems 1976-2006, a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. She has received awards, fellowships and grants from the Academy of American Poets, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Vermont Council on the Arts, as well as Pushcart Prizes, the Teasdale Award, and the Poets’ Prize. Voigt has served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and as the Vermont State Poet. She lives in Cabot, Vermont, and teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Elizabeth Ungerleider is a photographer and children’s psychotherapist specializing in expressive arts and grief therapies. She lives in Brattleboro, Vermont.

Eamonn Wall is the author of Writing the Irish West: Ecologies and Traditions (University of Notre Dame Press) and Sailing Lake Mareotis (Salmon Poetry), both published in 2011. A native of Co. Wexford, Ireland, Eamonn lives in Missouri where he teaches British and Irish Literature at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Sharon Webster is a writer and mixed media visual artist. She has written seven self-published poetry chapbooks and published in Green Mountains Review, Take Heart, Beam I & II, The Burlington Review, and Seven Days. Her book of poems, Everyone Lives Here, is forthcoming from Fomite Press in early 2014. She lives in Burlington, Vermont. Lynne Weinstein has worked as a photo editor at Life Magazine. Her photography has been shown in galleries in New England and published nationally. She is the recipient of grants from the Vermont Arts Council and The Vermont Community Foundation. Lynne lives in Putney, Vermont, and teaches photography at the Putney School.

John Willis received his MFA in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1986. Willis is the Professor of Photography at Marlboro College and co-founder of The In-Sight Photography Project, offering courses to southern Vermont area youth regardless of their ability to pay. He is a recipient of a 2011 John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. His collaborative book project with photographer Tom Young, Recycled Realities, was co-published by the Center of American Places and Columbia College in 2005 along with Willis’s second book, Views From The Reservation.

George Wuerthner is a professional photographer, writer and ecologist. He has written more than two dozen books on natural history and other environmental topics. He is currently the ecological projects director for the Foundation for Deep Ecology. Wuerthner has visited hundreds of mountain ranges around the West, more than 380 wilderness areas, more than 180 national park units, and every national forest west of the Mississippi.

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Acknowledgements

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rateful acknowledgment by Green Writers Press is made to the authors and publishers listed below that authorized copyrighted works to be reprinted for use in So Little Time. Greg Delanty wishes to thank his publishers: Carcanet Press, Louisiana State University Press, and Fomite Press, for allowing to reprint a number of these poems from his books.

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benjamin aleshire “Turbulence” and “Carrot” used by permission of Benjamin Aleshire. Copyright © 2013 by Benjamin Aleshire. sherman alexie “Indian Boy Love Song #1” reprinted from The Business of Fancydancing ©1992 by Sherman Alexie, by permission of Hanging Loose Press. “On the Amtrak from Boston to New York City” reprinted from First Indian on the Moon © 1993 by Sherman Alexie, by permission of Hanging Loose Press. julia alvarez “Vermont is the New Florida” used by permission Julia Alvarez. Copyright © 2013 by Julia Alvarez. david barber “Rogue Moss” used by permission David Barber. Copyright © 2013 by David Barber. sophie cabot black “The Harrowing” and “For the Taking” from The Descent used by permission of the author and Graywolf Press. Copyright © 2004 by Sophie Cabot Black. antonello borra “Dodo and Kiwi” used by permission of the author. Copyright © 2013 by Antonello Borra. robert bly “Clothespins” from Morning Poems. Reprinted by permission HarperCollins Publishers. Copyright © 1998 Robert Bly. david budbill “Driving Home at Night” reprinted from Judevine Copyright © 1991, 1999 by David Budbill, used by permission of the author and Chelsea Green Publishing Company. hayden carruth “Marshall Washer” first appeared in Brothers, I Loved You All published by Sheep Meadow Press; “The Cows at Night” was published by New Directions; “Bears at Raspberry Time” is reprinted from Toward the Distant Islands: New & Selected Poems (2006) is used by permission of Copper Canyon Press. christine casson “Prelude” from After the First World used by permission of the author and Star Cloud Press. Copyright © by Chrstine Casson 2008. david cavanagh “All Rise,” “Winter Green,” and “Bike Politic” used by permission of the author. Copyright © by David Cavanagh 2013. michael coffey “Trees of Knowledge” used by permission of the author. Copyright © by Michael Coffey 2013. billy collins “Snow Day” from from Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems reprinted by permission of Random House. Copyright © 2001 by Billy Collins. wyn cooper Both poems originally appeared in Postcards from the Interior, BOA Editions, 2005. david curzon “Instructions to a Seed” and “Fossil” used by permission of the author. Copyright © by David Curzon. ralph culver “For the Last Catamount” first appeared in Onion River Review and was reprinted in The Worcester Review. john f. deane “Eucalyptus” used by permission of the author. Copyright © 2013 by John F. Deane. chard deniord “At the Sap Wells” used by permission of the author. Copyright © 2013 by Chard DeNiord. caitlin doyle “Ocean City” used by permission of the author.

Copyright © 2013 by Caitlin Doyle. john engles “The Refusal” from Recounting the Seasons by John Engels. Copyright © 2005 by John Engels. Reprinted by permission University of Notre Dame Press. All rights reserved. david ferry “From the Third Georgic of Virgil” from The Georgics of Virgil by David Ferry. Copyright © 2006 by David Ferry. Reprinted by permission of the author and Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All rights reserved. “The Bird” and “October” from Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations by David Ferry. Copyright © 2012 by David Ferry. Reprinted by permission of the author and Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All rights reserved. robert frost “Fire and Ice,” “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” from the book The Poetry of Robert Frost edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright © 1923, 1969 by Henry Holt and Company, © 1951 by Robert Frost Reprinted by arrangement with Henry Holt and Company, LLC. ross gay “Ode to a Beekeeper” from Bringing the Shovel Down by Ross Gay Copyright © 2011 by Ross Gay Reprinted by permission by the University of Pittsburgh Press. eamon grennan “How Knowledge Happens” and “Comeback with Swans” used by permission of Eamon Grennan. Copyright © 2013. seamus heaney “Höfn and “Gifts of Rain” from District and Circle by Seamus Heaney. Copyright © 2007 by Seamus Heaney. Used by permission Farrar, Straus and Giroux All rights reserved. ken hebson “Artillera” used by permission of Ken Hebson. Copyright © 2013 by Ken Hebson. jane hirshfield “Like The Small Hole by The Path-Side Something Lives In” first appeared in Poetry; “I Wanted Only A Little” first appeared in The New Yorker; “Global Warming” from After by Jane Hirshfield (HarperCollins, 2006); and “In a Kitchen Where Mushrooms Were Washed, first appeared in Ploughshares, also in The Best American Poetry 2012; used by permission of Jane Hirshfield. gail holst-warhaft “Danby Forest” and “Buried Treasure” used by permission of Gail Holst-Warhaft. Copyright © 2013 by Gail Holst-Warhaft. gerard manley hopkins “Pied Beauty” and “Binsey Poplars” from Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose (Penguin Classics, 1985) didi jackson “Salvage” used by permission of Didi Jackson. Copyright © 2013 by Didi Jackson. major jackson “Pathetic Fallacy” and “Ode to Mt. Philo” used by permission of Major Jackson. Copyright © 2013 by Major Jackson. george kalogeris “Veil” used by permission of George Kalogeris. Copyright © 2013 by George Kalogeris. galway kinnell “Earth-Sparrow” and “Leaping Falls” from What a Kingdom It Was by Galway Kinnell. Copyright © 1960, renewed 1998 by Galway Kinnell. Used by permission Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. “Day-

break,” “Saint Francis and the Sow” and “Blackberry Eating” from Mortal Acts, Mortal Wounds by Galway Kinnell. Copyright © 1980, renewed 2008 by Galway Kinnell. Used by permission Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. leland kinsey “Picking Stone” and “Fall Light” used by permission of Leland Kinsey. Copyright © 2013 by Leland Kinsey. maxine kumin “Woodchucks” from Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief, by Maxine Kumin, published by Penguin Books. Copyright © 1972, 1982 by Maxine Kumin. Used with permission. adrie kusserow “The Crow” from Refuge. Copyright © 2013 by Adrie Kusserow. Originally in Green Mountains Review 25, #2 (2012). Reprinted with the permission of ThePermissions Company, Inc., on behalf of BOA Editions, Ltd., www.boaeditions.org. sydney lea “Small Jeremiad” and “Too Early for Grackles” from Young of the Year by Sydney Lea. Copyright © 2011 Sydney Lea. Four Way Books, New York NY. lesle lewis “Sugarloaf ” from lie down too. Copyright © 2011 by Lesle Lewis. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Alice James Books, www.alicejamesbooks.org. buff lindau “Record Rainfalls” used by permission of Buff Lindau © 2013. fred marchant “Bristlecone” was first published in Tipping Point (Word Works). Copyright © 1994 by Fred Marchant. “First Question” used by permission of the author. Copyright © 2013 by Fred Marchant. gary margolis “The End of Football” used by permission of Gary Margolis © 2013. kathryn maris “Street Sweeper” used by permission of the author from The Book of Jobs (Four Way Books, 2006). thomas mccarthy “Foraging Honey-Bees” used by permission of Thomas McCarthy © 2013. ellen mccullouch-lovell “Seeking Rest” and “After Su Tung P’o” used by permission of Ellen McCulloch-Lovell © 2013. paul mcloughlin “from The End of British Farming” used by permission of Paul McLoughlin © 2013. andrew mcneillie “Insomnia” used by permission of Andrew McNeillie © 2013. gerry murphy “Et In Arcadia EGo” used by permission of Gerry Murphy © 2013. bernard o’donoghue “The Drummers” used by permission of Bernard O’Donoghue. Copyright © 2013 by Bernard O’Donoghue. liam Ó muirthile “Country Relish” and “The Heron” used by permission of Liam Ó Muirthile © 2013. mary oliver “In Blackwater Woods” from American Primitive by Mary Oliver. Copyright © 1978, 1979, 1980, 1981, 1982, 1983 by Mary Oliver. Used by permission of Little Brown and Company. All rights reserved. grace paley “In Deepest Summer,” “Responsibility,” and “Signs” from Begin Again: Collected Poems by Grace Paley. Copyright © 2000 by Grace Paley. Reprinted by permission Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. “News” and “Life is as risky” from fidelity by Grace Paley. Copyright © 2008 by The Estate of Grace

Paley. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. jay parini “Consumption” and “Some Effects of Global Warming in Addison County” used by permission of Jay Parini © 2013. verandah porche “Waves in the Woods,” and “Savor” used by permission of Verandah Porche © 2013. adrienne rich “What Kind of Times Are These” Copyright © 2013 by The Adrienne Rich Literary Trust. Copyright © 1995 by Adrienne Rich from Later Poems: Selected and New (1971–2012), by Adrienne Rich. Used by permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. maurice riordan “The Drift” used by permission of Maurice Riordan. Copyright © 2013 by Maurice Riordan. marjorie ryerson “Harvest” used by permission of Marjorie Ryerson. Copyright © 2013 by Marjorie Ryerson. stephen sandy “Names for Birds” copyright Stephen Sandy 2010, 2013. Used by permission of Stephen Sandy. charles simic “A Quiet Afternoon” used by permission of Charles Simic © 2013. tracy k. smith “A Hunger So Honed” from The Body’s Question. Copyright © 2003 by Tracy K. Smith Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of GraywolfPress, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org. william stafford “The Well Rising” Copyright © 1960, 1998 the Estate of William Stafford. Reprinted from The Way It Is with the permission of Graywolf Press. www.graywolfpress.org. barry sternlieb “O’Brien’s Cove” and “Mayflies” from Winter Crows (Codhill Press). Copyright © 2009 by Barry Sternlieb. ruth stone “In the Next Galaxy” first appeared in In the Next Galaxy published by Copper Canyon Press. Copyright © 2004 by Ruth Stone. Used by permission of the Estate of Ruth Stone. ross thurbur “Petal Drop” used by permission of Ross Thurber. Copyright © 2013 by Ross Thurber. daniel tobin “Clear Cut” and “The Expedition” used by permission of Daniel Tobin © 2013. rachel trousdale “Traffic” used by permission of Rachel Trousdale © 2013. jean valentine “The River at Wolf ” from Home Deep Blue: New and Selected Poems. Copyright © 1989 by Jean Valentine. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Alice James Books, www.alicejamesbooks.org. ellen bryant voigt “The Farmer” from The Lotus Flowers by Ellen Bryant Voigt. Copyright © 1987 by Ellen Bryant Voigt. Used with permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. “High Winds Flare Up and the Old House Shudders” from Shadow of Heaven by Ellen Bryant Voigt. Copyright © 2002 by Ellen Bryant Voigt. Used with permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. eamonn wall “Of Multitude” is from A Tour of Your Country (Salmon Publishing, Cliffs of Moher, Ireland, 2008) and “Farm Aid is from Iron Mountain Road (Salmon Publishing, Cliffs of Moher, Ireland, 1997). Used with permission. sharon webster “Resistance” used by permission of Sharon Webster © 2013. w.b. yeats “The Second Coming” is from Michael Roberts and the Dancer (1921). 203

List of Photographs judith aronson

p. 20: Foothills of the Himalayas, toward Jomsom, Nepal, 1973. p. 51: Houses with roof shingles of cow dung, near Khajuraho, India 1973. p. 53: Dahl Lake, Srinagar, Kashmir, 1973 p. 118: From the studio window, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2005. p. 141: Leaves, Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2000. p. 156: Near Kali Gandaki Valley, Himalayas, Nepal, 1973 p. 160: Slums of New York City, the Upper West Side (106th Street and Amsterdam Avenue), 1970. p. 190: Singapore Harbor, 1972.

valerie s. banschbach

p. 70: Carpenter Ant, Camp Johnson, Colchester, Vermont, May 2013

daniel barlow

p. 73: Felled Tree, Montpelier, Vermont. p. 178: Canoeists, Vermont.

steven brock p. i: p. 12: p. 37: p. 144: p. 123:

Playground Tunnel, San Francisco, 1999. Bridge Cross, Peru, 1993. Sari Drying, India, 1991. Adobe Oxen, Peru, 1983. Laughing Mother, Peru, 1987.

annie tiberio cameron

p. 40: Ice Trees,Roxbury State Forest, Vermont. p. 132: Sunflowers, Montpelier, Vermont.

ben cavanagh

p. 91: Hanging Bicycle Wheels, Ottawa. p. 177: Spinning Bicycle Wheel, Ottawa.

rossa cole p. 25 p. 90 p. 120 p. 172

Woman Biking, Sag Harbor, New York. Prius of Twigs, 2010, (Construction) Ducks in Winter Water, Sag Harbor, New York. Shimmering Wave, East Hampton, New York.

mariana cook

p. xi: Oak Tree | Santa Barbara, California | 22 January 2000, 4:50 p.m. | Reproduced in Close at Hand (The Quantuck Lane Press, 2007). 204 s o

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p. 32: Winter Wall | Kent, Connecticut | 17 February 2008 | Reproduced in Stone Walls: Personal Boundaries (Damiani, 2011). p. 68: Clouds and Tree | West Tisbury, Massachusetts | 8 August 1999, 5:00 p.m. | Reproduced in Close at Hand (The Quantuck Lane Press, 2007). p. 111: Emily and Caterpillar | Saint-Barthélemy, West Indies | 22 March 2000, 3:30 p.m. | Reproduced in Close at Hand (The Quantuck Lane Press, 2007). p. 112: Brown Beech Mushrooms | New York City | 1 May 2000, 5:25 p.m. | Reproduced in Close at Hand (The Quantuck Lane Press, 2007). p. 143: Oak Leaf | New York City | 31 October 2000, 9:40 a.m. | Reproduced in Close at Hand (The Quantuck Lane Press, 2007). p. 185: Astilboides | North Bennington, Vermont | 29 May 1999, 7:45 p.m. | Reproduced in Close at Hand (The Quantuck Lane Press, 2007). p. 188: Oak Tree | New York City | 30 November 1999, 3:15 p.m.

dede cummings

p. 164: Icicles, West Brattleboro, Vermont, 2013. p. 174: Washed-Out Bridge, Royalton, Vermont, 2011

johanna gardener

p. 95: Choice on Camel’s Hump, Huntington, Vermont.

brian geerlings

p. 103: Shadow of Blackberries, Salem, Oregon

catherine dianich gruver

p. xii: Stone Wall, Dummerston, Vermont. p. xvi: Logging, Dummerston, Vermont. p. 5: Bee Boxes, Guilford, Vermont. p. 16: Cows Before Rain, Leeds, Maryland. p. 28: Barn, Scott Farm, Dummerston, Vermont. p. 82: Covered Bridge, Dummerston, Vermont. p. 84:. Old Growth Forest, Olympic Penninsula, Washington. p. 89: Diner, Cecil County, Maryland. p. 100: House and Bridge, Dummerston, Vermont. p. 105: Kelp, Big Sur, California. p. 115: Cows, Dummerston, Vermont. p. 124: Clear Cut, Brattleboro, Vermont. p. 135: Gourds and Squash, Cecil County, Maryland. p. 180: Esther’s Garden, Dummerston, Vermont. p. 194: West River, Vermont.

amelia hancock

p. viii: Tropical Strom Irene, Roylaton Vermont, 2011.

stephen heron

p. 151: Bumble Bee, Dublin, Ireland. p. 163: Rain on the Window, Dublin, Ireland.

jerry hiam p. 10: p. 22: p. 34: p. 47:

Loosestrife, Quissett, Falmouth, Massachusetts, 2010. Deer, Putney Vermont, 2011. Two Crows, Putney, Vermont, 2011. Heron, Putney, Vermont, 2011.

pe ter hope

p. 18: Crowfoot Glacier, Banff, British Columbia. Banff in 1975 showing a photo of the same view (1917) of Crowfoot glacier which by 1975 had lost one of its toes. p. 42: Road Washed Out, Milo White Road, Jerhico, Vermont. Milo White Road, Jericho, Vermont, washed out by the magnified downpours resulting from climate change during July 3 rains and floods, 2013. p. 166: Clear Cut, Northern California. Northern California many years ago that ‘once was a redwood forest.’

frederic larson

p. 128: Oil Slick Bird, San Francisco, California, 2007 / corbis. Western Grebe covered in oil at Fort Baker cove in Sausalito from a 2007 accident at the Bay Bridge.

neil louie

p. ii: Tree Portrait #1, Meritt B.C., Canada, 2009. p. 109: Chief Martin Louie, of the Nadleh Whut’en Band, 2013 The First Nation group is in opposition to the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipelines Project to construct twin tar sands pipelines, running from Bruderheim, Alberta, to Kitimat, British Columbia. Groups like the Yinka Dene Alliance have been organized to campaign against the project.

evie love tt p. 15: p. 130: p. 148: p. 158:

Trees, Putney, Vermont. Water, Putney, Vermont Peace Signs, Brattleboro, Vermont. Trees, Putney, Vermont.

declan mccabe p. 27: p. 66: p. 128: p. 183:

Rogue Tulip. Fossils. Black Snow. White Snow.



willow o’feral p. 8: p. 57: p. 116: p. 182:

Betty at Caspar Beach. Shayna & the Pacific. Bonfire. Atticus & Will, Navarro Ridge, California.

mark ostow

p. 154: Hurricane Sandy, 2012. Sandy was the largest hurricane ever recorded over the Atlantic Ocean, with tropical storm-force winds spanning 1,100 miles, roughly the distance from Manhattan to Miami.

samantha perrelli

p. 24: Voice, Passion, Presence and Voids / Self Portrait, 2013, Branford, Connecticut.

marjorie ryerson

p. 136-137: Mushrooms at Base of Birch Tree; Randolph, Vermont, 2011.

zachary stephens

p. 79: “Made In Vermont” Brattleboro, Vermont, 2013. p. 97: “Mulch” Vernon, Vermont, 2013.

mark unrau

p. 106: The Qinghai Railway, Lhasa. A Chinese woman riding a train into Lhasa. This woman lost in her mind gazing out into a world that would be similar to gazing into space, a place foreign and fantastic. The Qinghai railway is the most ambitious engineering project the Chinese have ever ensued; a sort of space craft carrying ideas and ideologies, representing their push forward, to develop. p. 171: Dead Fish, Banff, Alberta.

elizabe th ungerleider p. 74-75: Lake Nakuru, Kenya, 2013. p. 99: Boys Playing, Kenya, 2013.

john willis

p . 146: “White Sands Missile Museum” White Sands, New Mexico p. 168: “White Sands Missile Testing Grounds” White Sands, New Mexico

lynne jaeger weinstein

p. 59: Botaniclas—Ferns, Beets, and Sweet Peas Putney, Vermont. p. 60: Frozen Apple Tree, Newfane, Vermont.

george wuerthner

p. 126: Mountaintop Removal Coal Mine, Virginia, reprinted from ENERGY: Overdevelopment and the Delusion of Endless Growth (Watershed Media, 2012). s o

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