Poems by Andrew McCall

Decomposition

by Andrew McCall

From Canary Spring 2022

Andrew lives near where glaciers stopped their flow 10,000 years ago in Ohio -- moraines and gorges to the east, and glacial scour to the west. He is in the Muskingum River watershed.

It’s right,
to be left in a shroud
wrapped tight
like a caterpillar
waiting to split its skin
in metamorphosis.

Throw away the steel box,
the fluids that make cells arrest,
mourners, the alb and cincture,
the car that carries the body.

Love, do this instead -
drag me in a litter of wicker
to that patch of bloodroot
and its crenulations of leaf,

that strange redeemer that,
instead of eating only sun,
might find my feast beyond
its red rhizhomes.

Don’t unbind me
even if they order you.
Let them try and find me -
sucked up in lianas, in the
beech’s green teeth,
in the ivy that no one
wants to touch.

© Andrew McCall

Disobedience

by Andrew McCall

From Canary Summer 2021

This valley burned in May, the only
water a foot deep, drawn

from volcanos swaddled in
snow and spiked with pines.

Some plants still live. Here I was paid
to find fields of an invasive mustard –

The only nectar source now for
a bumblebee of uncertain status.

The plant, a green spindle in Eurasia,
was here, on thirty thousand feet

of sediment, a multi-stemmed bush
emitting massive clouds of volatile

chemicals to deter the cabbage white.
Every day I felt the gas burning my legs.

I searched the ditches alongside
fields of nut and cotton, some broken

at the bottom into friable loam,
others slick with glyphosate and Sevin.

Near a peach farm, a woman held
a gun up and told me to ‘piss off’.

It was all haze and tillage dust and heat.
Once, I looked and saw a bag, full with

rotting bolls, but no – instead it hid
mummified pets, all shot in the eye.

I never saw bees. They knew better.
An official told me to quit, told me to

pull everything out – the plant
competed with the tomatoes, sucking

moisture away from the irrigation lines.
I tried to comply, ripped root and stem apart

but smiled as the fruit dropped
into fissures still wet with water.

History of a field

by Andrew McCall

From Canary Summer 2021

Before, thirsty grass,
potassium hoarder,
teeth cracker and inedible
stingy cob maker. Then
soy, to make up for a nitrogen
deficit. Commodity again.
Sprayed with -cides: herb,
pest, and fungi, as if
a thin mycelium
would spoil the whole fruit. After,
Sugar Maple, not for beauty,
not for red blooms of anthocyanin
leaves, but for plastic spiles,
tubes, and buckets. A collision
of commerce and cellulose. Now,
Bluets and Haircap Moss
nibbling away on the edges -
useless, unkempt, underfoot.
Not a penny for a ton,
and yet they will hold the memory
of the shaved-off contours
when nothing is left to
extract.

Maize

by Andrew McCall

From Canary Summer 2021

Surrounded, I’ve tried to love it,
strained to see the ancestral genes
choked by modern mutation. Teosinte - paltry
ancestor, wouldn’t recognize its child,
this water slurper this bland teeth rotter,
Pesticide platter for cattle, not worth
it – takes ten pounds of this grass to build
a beef heart, stew leg, or rump on the plate,
just last week I sliced open a cow’s back
and ate it with cheese and wine -
who would rather chew
the dry sterile thing we plant from
self-destructing seed?

Let’s start again.
Burn the tassel, sheath, and ear and let the
fields lie in fallow, knowing that in two years
the invaders will awaken
from under the stubble and herbicide.
Displacers of the natives - bindweed and
sweet clover, red clover, Verbascum -
fecund and rich with nuts and fruit, unruly, bent
and tendril-twirled, chokers.
I’d prefer this and starve a little, losing
myself in weeds, no rows to show
the straight way out.