Issue Number 57, Summer 2022

Lease Agreement

for Eva Theodora

“Here in this room there is only time and the space my body fills.”
Etta Blum, “The Space My Body Fills”

by Mose Graves

Mose currently resides on the lush lands of the Duwamish people near the headwaters of the Sammamish River, along the banks of Issaquah Creek, behind the Taco Bell.

Prior to your arrival,
before you fled that airless cave
for this address,

the space you now occupy
was never vacant. In the beginning,
pyroclastic boulders

bobbed like croutons in a hot
metal soup; so much pressure, so much
suppressed anger!

Then fire turned to flood, and for eons
immense creatures of vague, mutable beauty
moved through these rooms.

We were all astonished when
the mountains sloughed off their muddy pajamas
and donned green jackets.

That was a party! True trees,
100-foot ferns, sponge moss underfoot,
mycorrhiza

tying the ginkgos’ shoelaces
together and everyone, more or less, getting along…
Naturally,

the criminal element muscled in:
lizard-brained galoots, gorillas for the mob.
Nobody you’d want to meet.

The current residents are
squirrelly, too. A fun-loving bunch, really,
but watch your back—

from one day to the next
you never know whose blood is up, whose blood
will stain the stones.

We hope you like the light,
the restful shadows, how the dew winks in the bright
grass at dawn.

The gingkoes are still around, and
most of the insects. Maid service, however, has been
discontinued,

and the weather needs repair.
Don’t fret. The rules are posted. You’re home now. You’re here
for a reason.

Meals are on your own.

© Mose Graves

Drought

by Mose Graves

Mose currently resides on the lush lands of the Duwamish people near the headwaters of the Sammamish River, along the banks of Issaquah Creek, behind the Taco Bell.

Time was a river ran through this land,
dousing the acres of doubt between plow and plant
like an endless caravan of answers
and there wasn’t a question—
“Wheat or straw? Corn or crows?”
too shrewd for any man to understand.

So don’t tell me, “Maybe tomorrow…” this sorry patch
of sullen air will shed a tear for us.
The rooster died the week the well ran dry and now
only the split-second insects scissor and saw
in the yard where my eggless hens scratch
their hieroglyphic epitaphs in the dust.

A half a dozen summer months and not a drop of rain.

Lost my hope you say? Well, yeah, I guess.
Could be it just kinda whispered away, day by day,
inch by inch, the richest topsoil in the state
vanished, like sand in an hourglass.
Or my wife, she might of packed it when she left
(called me a fool for staying here, to boot!)
along with my pride and everything else
worth working for. For pity’s sake,
I could eat my weight in bitter roots
without a lick of butter,
but I’ll be damned if for the life of me
I don’t ache like an open grave,
just praying for thunder—

melons rotten before they’re ripe
split open like skulls on a battlefield
while lizards skittering through the wiry vines
skirmish with spiders and skeletal stalks
rattle their bones in the wind.

Like to make a man go flashflood mad
to wake with his head still damp with dreams
and see that flaming insane sun
escape asylum in the East,
rise and set fire to its bed
of low-lying clouds that scatter like frightened geese
or turn to ash above his slowly smoking rows…

Each morning I fill up my pockets with rocks
casting them after me as I walk
pretending they are seeds
but only my shadow grows
longer

with every step I take.

© Mose Graves

A Native New Yorker Speaks

by Mose Graves

Mose currently resides on the lush lands of the Duwamish people near the headwaters of the Sammamish River, along the banks of Issaquah Creek, behind the Taco Bell.

It’s not the killing it’s the waste—
meat, bones, hide.

We are prized here only for our teeth
and the magic dance we do
to keep from diving under subways.

The sun is my father.
The moon is my mother.
The snake is my brother.
We share one hole

smoke sulfur on the Hudson
stoke the sweat lodge of the Bronx
trap beaver pelts at 69th and Lexington
cop nickel bags of powdered elk horn
near the sacred lake in Prospect Park

whatever turns you on.
Yadda yadda yadda!

The first man was Hopi.
He learned from Coyote
the secret of the seven worlds
of which this is the fourth, now ending.

“Hey! Hey mista! Which way to Columbus?”
the Potorikan kid wants to know.

I wake before dawn
splash my face at the sink
while outside steam rises
through the sewer covers

like spirits escaping their burial mounds.
Running Water is my warrior name.

© Mose Graves

And You Will Wake

by D. James Smith

Smith lives in the irrigated, semi-arid desert plain of California's central valley, spending a great deal of time in the nearby foothills and the Sierra.

Beyond the rotting fence
and the gate that leans,
banging in the wind

in fits and starts
like a sleepy drunk about to collapse,

beyond the wild mustard and the sunflowers
and the bulrush choking a little dogleg of a creek
you could find, if you looked,

the huge, black bees that drone there
like old Messerschmitts in sun-polished air.

There is something
just below the floating illusion
of cloud shadows wrinkling the pond’s face.

Yet when I watch a red-tailed hawk
oar slowly over the lake, brushing

the top of it, its talons half in the dark water, half
in the bright pennies spread over the surface,
it rises, passing over me, standing

on that shore, transfigured by its grace,
as it mounts with little pushups

its staircase of air, more specific
than any symbol,
greater than any dream.

Previously published in Poetry Canada Review.

© D. James Smith

Spring to Summer

by Wendy Blaxland

Wendy’s home nestles among native Australian bush edging Lane Cove National Park above a creek which roars after rain. Water dragons sun themselves on old boulders shouldering out of the thin Hawkesbury sandstone soil. And huge gum trees provide hole-homes for screeching sulphur-crested cockatoos, crimson-headed king parrots, and gossiping flocks of vibrant rainbow lorikeets.

Ah, no - our lush wisteria blooms are finishing.
All that velvet grace and scent
is fading, falling, gone.

But look – quietly in the wings
of the great spring carnival of flowers
wait a thousand white star jasmine buds,
still furled and folded
like miniature umbrellas,
embroidered on a carpet of green leaves

Hold your breath.

When the silent conductor nods to them
and flicks a gleaming ray
from his baton just so,
they will unfurl in slow silence
and twirl their way
into the spotlight of our sight,
slow-mo open
into dizzying whorls of scent,
like Sufi mystics
twirling in their trance dance
older than the sun...

Photo by Luca Camellini

© Wendy Blaxland

Another Summer Day

by Wendy Blaxland

Wendy’s home nestles among native Australian bush edging Lane Cove National Park above a creek which roars after rain. Water dragons sun themselves on old boulders shouldering out of the thin Hawkesbury sandstone soil. And huge gum trees provide hole-homes for screeching sulphur-crested cockatoos, crimson-headed king parrots, and gossiping flocks of vibrant rainbow lorikeets.

I float in our pellucid pool:
recognise cicadas across the gully thrumming for a mate,
breathe the swooning scent of fresh pittosporum flowers,
spy a blue-gum shrugging down a scroll of ochre bark
to show her smooth white neck
rising from that rough-frilled gown.

© Wendy Blaxland

Imperiled

Humanity has only 100 years left to leave Earth or perish,
Stephen Hawking believed.
– the inquirer.net

by Paula Colangelo

Not far from where Paula currently lives in the Lake Worth Inlet watershed, blue herons forage when waters are calm. Some days, at high tide, ocean meets seawall and the intercoastal splashes on sidewalks and submerges small docks.

Missiles plunge into dead water,
practicing. Children taunt children.
Students hunted in school corridors

cloak themselves in silence.
Over and over again—black
skin pressed to pavement.

People flee from cars driven
into crowds. Blood letting out
onto asphalt mirrors ancestral

suffering—generations shackled,
native land usurped, naked masses
showered with gas. A prisoner

is beaten behind doors. Gradually
we die by our own hand. Witness
the eyes of the malnourished—

the same eyes staring from photographs
taken decades ago. Today’s starving
line sidewalks, fill classrooms,

live in cars. Water rises
into cities. Less than a century
before we drown, arms pinned

at our sides, the only music,
a tympani of loss.
Earth, our old love, watches.

© Paula Colangelo

Inadmissible Evidence

by Richard LeBlond

Richard lives in Richlands, a small farming town in eastern North Carolina gradually being eaten whole by Jacksonville, a city that used to be 15 miles away but has grown ever closer as it transforms cropland into suburbs.

The wooded parcel on the Upper Cape had been purchased by a developer. But a group of residents wanted to keep the land in its present wooded state. To do this they needed weapons in addition to the arguments about the pace of development and the need for open space and aquifer protection. It would be helpful if the parcel itself were special, containing something of significance to hurl at regulatory bodies, something that would forge an alliance with an agency interested in significant things.

The parcel had been pastureland from the 19th century into the early years of the 20th, when the farm was abandoned. The land had lain idle since, at least in terms of human use. Like most abandoned land on Cape Cod, the pasture was eventually claimed first by the pines and scrub oak, and later by the taller oaks. Several large pines remained on the parcel, but the land now belonged to the oaks above and the huckleberry below. It was, by today’s standards of significance, an insignificant habitat, and would fall flat at the feet of the regulatory body.

The pasture it used to be could well have been significant. Pastureland is grassland, and grasslands on Cape Cod often are reservoirs of the very rare, like the now-lost heath hen. A member of the grouse family, the heath hen once ranged from southern New Hampshire to Virginia. It was so over-hunted that by 1835 it was only found on Martha’s Vineyard. There it depended on grassy sandplain habitat kept open by naturally occurring fires, which prevented succession to forest. From the cover of low pitch pines and scrub oak, both fire-adapted trees, the hen foraged in the adjacent pastures and heaths. The bird was last seen in 1932.

No sandplain rarity will find a home in our insignificant woodland parcel. The pasture is long gone, and any lingering scrub oak openings have been closed by the white and black oak canopy.

This does not mean the woodland has run out of possibilities. Tucked away in its hollows, where the soil is moist, dark, and rich, are pockets of young beech, hickory, and holly. Eventually, these trees could dominate this woodland along with the oaks, and a new order of groundcover – including orchids, ferns, and clubmosses – would replace the monotonous huckleberry. This community also has its share of rarities and is itself a significant habitat. All our woodland parcel needs to produce it is time.

But time isn’t on this woodland’s side. The fate of this land won’t be decided by its history or its potential natural riches, but by today’s economics. Because we value this woodland for its commercial potential and not as an evolving forest, we not only ignore its possibilities; we lose them. It isn’t just the trees that are replaced but also the soil and its seed bank.

Unlike the forest’s recovery from the pasture phase, it will not return from residential and commercial development. These are the final uses.

© Richard LeBlond

A Hard Concept to Sell

by Richard LeBlond

Richard lives in Richlands, a small farming town in eastern North Carolina gradually being eaten whole by Jacksonville, a city that used to be 15 miles away but has grown ever closer as it transforms cropland into suburbs.

He was the manager of a small municipal airport in southeastern Massachusetts. The local chamber of commerce wanted more and longer runways. The FAA wanted facilities added to improve safety. The local conservation commission had erected a Great Wall of Paperwork around nearby wetlands to keep out the proposed extensions and improvements. And now a state natural resource office was asking the airport manager to preserve an open grassland – eminently suitable to accommodate the pressure to grow – for the sake of a rare butterfly and a few endangered plant species.

It was enough to make the man tear his hair out, had time left him any. The state office had sent him a document about the obscure and beleaguered creatures – obscure because of inconspicuousness and rarity, beleaguered because that rarity was an apparent consequence of loss of habitat. The state, or at least this small portion of the state, wanted him to become an advocate for the preservation of the upland tract before his governing board, the airport commission.

“That’s a hard concept to sell,” he said to the state officials when they arrived for the pre-arranged site visit. The pressures on him were all going in the other direction. He needed more land, not less.

“Why should I consider doing this?” he asked curtly, visibly annoyed at this interruption of his normal schedule by a youthful contingent of bureaucratic bug and blossom savers.

(I was present at these proceedings, and have omitted places and names. But they could have taken place – in fact, are taking place – almost everywhere.)

The state officials explained that protecting this habitat would protect the state’s biological diversity, that the more native species present in an ecosystem, the healthier that ecosystem tends to be.

“Who benefits from this?” the manager asked. Everyone, replied the state; future generations. The manager thought about that for a moment, apparently weighing that benefit to future generations against the current generation’s clamor for expanded and improved facilities. “That’s a hard concept to sell,” he repeated.

The state representatives countered that less than five percent of all the world’s plants had been researched for their food, medicinal, and other human use potential, how plant-based medicines alone were a $6 billion a year industry, and how plant species extinction worldwide was approaching one an hour.

The manager thought about this. “Are any of these going extinct?” he asked, waving the state document. They could be, was the reply. The butterfly and two of the plant species were restricted to southern New England and Long Island, and their largest remaining populations were in this part of the state. If they could be saved, this was the best place to do it.

He agreed to visit the site within the airport complex and see for himself what had brought this group of experts to his backyard. We clambered into the cab and back of the airport’s pickup and bounced along a dirt road, around a runway, and into the multi-usable grasslands. For those of us on the side of preservation, it was like visiting a patient who had been diagnosed as having a fatal yet curable disease, but the cure was in short supply.

Suddenly, the manager stuck his head out the window of the cab to yell at those of us in the back of the truck: “Where are they? I’ll run ‘em down.” Oddly, it seemed positive, uttered in a tone that expressed a mix of good and bad humor. He might have been saying that even though he had no intention of backing down from his original position, he had nothing against us personally. He trusted us to interpret his threat correctly, that even though it was made in jest, it was nonetheless an expression of the difficult position he was in, a position our arguments were trying to make even more difficult.

No sooner had he said this than the rare butterfly was seen. The pickup stopped and we all jumped out, including the manager. He rushed over to where the zoologist among us had gone in pursuit. The manager’s interest was sudden, instinctual. It had knocked down his guard.

Then he tried to find a few butterflies on his own. I think he was amazed that the contents of an arcane and partly Latinized bureaucratic document had come to life. It raised a cautious hope that the airport manager might consider arguing for the butterfly’s landing rights.

He was less impressed by the plants. At best, they were landscape. At worst, they fueled wildfires, obscured landing lights, and cracked runways. But he concluded the visit by asking the state people to prepare a slick document full of attractive pictures and dire predictions that he could present to his commission. It was, after all, a hard concept to sell.

© Richard LeBlond

Loneliness

by Erin Liana Johnson

Erin lives among the redwood groves on the edge of the Soquel Creek watershed, a short distance from the ocean waves in the territories of the Amah Mutsun and Awaswas. She hears owls at night and nuthatches in the morning.

I read in the news
that fireflies are diminishing.
On the banks of the Mekong River
you can hardly see their stars anymore,
dancing through the breathing night.
There are now so many artificial lights
that they can no long find each other
and dart about
signaling frantically,
tiny, hopeful ships passing
lost in the glare.

I don’t know how anyone finds
anyone, these days.

© Erin Liana Johnson

Drought on the Navajo Reservation

by Gail Rudd Entrekin

Gail lives amid the Coastal Range east of San Francisco Bay in the San Pablo Bay watershed just above San Pablo Creek on lands of the Chocheno and Karkin Ohlone people.

Three roan mares showed up outside our trailer
heads down, ribs protruding like carcasses, and
while we watched from the doorway, they slumped
down, one leg at a time, two of them dead
by the time they hit the ground. We went out
with a bucket of water, Lincoln and me, and
we set it down by the last mare standing and
she let us come, had come to us, we figured,
where they never come, like they were almost
spirits and had to trust us now, and she slowly
moved her head and drank.
Ten gallons a day
they need, and there hasn’t been but a drop or two
in 15 years, the ground like rock, cracked, the soil
snatched away into the air, nothing green to eat
and not even much that’s brown, and still we live here,
hauling water for coins from the watering station.

No one on the rez that hasn’t seen them dead.
They’ve got to forage thirty pounds a day,
hundreds of thousands of them sharing this pitiless land.

We used to see them blow out like the wind, their manes
whipping, their fine legs pounding,
but now
their mouths are full of mud, so weak they stick in
at the watering hole, and they just lie down
and die.
These sacred horses were here before the People came.
We go out every day to meet them. We bring our wagon,
fill the old deserted troughs, and they come right to us, their
big eyes full of dust and flies hovering and they don’t understand
what it is that’s happening to them, they just lower their heads
and drink.

© Gail Rudd Entrekin

Quoth the Owl, Nevermore

by Steve Bailey

Steve's home is between the Appalachian Mountains and the Atlantic Ocean in the James River watershed. Canoeists and kayakers on the James are bound to see a Great Blue Heron or two standing in shallows or gracefully gliding overhead among the bass, catfish, and longnose gar.

I could hear him in the late afternoons when golden summer sunlight pushes through the trees and makes the leaves facing it look luminescent against their counterpart's black background. He would hoot from a tree in the wooded lot behind my house, and I walked around to see if I could spot this bird, but I could not. He was somewhere up high in one of the tall, majestic trees. I hollered into the quiet lot.
"Hey, Strigiformes! You're making all this noise, and the sun is still up. You are supposed to be nocturnal. Didn't you read your user's manual?"

There was no response. As soon as I was back in my chair on my deck, my beer slightly warmer than when I left it, the owl let out a couple of hoots. As the Brits would say, he’s a cheeky rascal.

I have seen owls used in literature as symbols of death. Many Native American tribes believe that the sound of an owl in daylight is a bad omen. I never put stock in superstition, no matter the source. I feel the same way about the presence of ravens I see when I go on walks. They are all over my neighborhood. Ravens are a symbol of sorrow, omens of death. But this is Richmond, Virginia, and Edgar Allan Poe is our dark poet. So, these jetty birds are as appropriate here as Cardinals are in St Louis.

An interesting story about an owl in Salem, Oregon, was reported on MSNBC in 2015. Joggers, including the town's mayor, were attacked by one such creature, presumably protecting its nest, or maybe just adverse to humans engaging in physical fitness. But rather than hunt the bird down, the city marked off the area and put up warning signs. In other words, they surrendered a jogging trail to this fine feathered, not-friend. It was a show of respect for nature.

#

I woke up this morning to chainsaws screaming as they tore into trees in the wooded lot behind my house. Then, in the afternoon, I heard a mechanical sound and walked over to the lot to see its source. It was a Caterpillar Forest Machine, a powerful apparatus with an arm like a backhoe that rips up small trees and casts them to the side, in a pile, like fallen soldiers in a hopeless war. The wooded lot is being made ready for a new house. 

A neighbor came by and stood beside me. "That's an amazing machine," he said with admiration. "At this rate, it will have that lot completely cleared out by the end of the day." Despite some fifty years of environmental rhetoric, the loss of natural habitat by defoliation goes on unabated. With the global population growing on an average of eighty-one million people a year, it will only accelerate. As a result, no creature is safe from eradication.

Now I sit on my deck, watching the sunlight make leaves glow, and listen for the owl. It is not Strigiformes' hoot that is the bad omen. It is his silence.

© Steve Bailey

What Kind of Mushroom Is This?

by Richard Lyons

Richard lives one hundred yards from the Wolf River Watershed, where the Wolf River Conservancy meets Walnut Grove Lake--some twenty miles east of the Mississippi River.

The details, i.e., the mechanics of decomposition, may sprout a
horn—is it a sapling’s little thumb?

Or is it rhinoceros-horn? A beetle’s pinchers?
Should I ask humility to permit some forms

to flourish while others wither in slow fire? Can I bear getting
my way? I kick over a reddish

brown mushroom. Is this one poisonous?
Can we break the world into cap and gills?

Can we feel lost w/o too much panic and regret?
Can the break hold its breath so that it sticks to us

like right friendship w/o gagging the throat? Not to interfere
might return us to the seasons

if we don’t disparage anyone’s desires, if we don’t curse anyone’s
defenses that circulate like pesky bees.

Spores will carousel haphazardly, spreading an indigence
that affixes some pretty large trees and a million apertures

circulating mineral saps and salves with feathery exhalations. Some specific
microorganisms may depend on the generosity

of our recent epithelial cells. These losses may be the delicacies the
smallest mites relish in the future we used to take for granted.

© Richard Lyons

Sea Jelly

by Mary Christine Delea

Mary lives where the Clackamas River and the Willamette River meet, on the hill above the Willamette Falls in Oregon. However, she is spending the summer on Long Island, where the Secatogues lived on the banks of the Great South Bay and inland creeks.

Imagine yourself
The possibilities
Immortal clones, bioluminescent organs, stinging tentacles     No
brain, no bones, no heart, just bag body
But the mouth! O mouth centered on the body underneath
     Imagine food going in and     when you need to
move     you tighten your midsection
and the water that shoots out moves you forward     However,
that takes energy
Mostly you will just float dependent on the currents, your
environment
Unless you are a bloodybelly comb jelly
O name that makes you fierce
O body Valentine red and transparent     organs shaped
like human skulls     living so deep you do not recognize real light
And move
Imagine you would beat your tiny cilia as if rowing a boat
Always beating, always moving
     That color
     That depth
You are invisible to those who would harm you
But just to be sure you keep rowing
Imagine the darkness, the stamina
O brainless being bright red looking like a human brain
Yet you are without any thoughts of grief,
Hatred, worry, envy, fear, regret
O bloodbelly comb jelly
The possibilities

© Mary Christine Delea

Elderberry Music

by Lisa Novick

Currently living on a clay floodplain near an oak and hornbeam forest above the Yvette River in the Paris Basin, Lisa usually lives on a granitic alluvial fan near chaparral above the Arroyo Seco, a tributary of the channelized Los Angeles River.

Summer mornings at home in Southern California, I like to lie in bed and listen to the birds feasting in the elderberry tree in my backyard. Despite the hum of the nearby freeway, I can hear wings flapping and branches rustling as the birds hop from one cluster of dark blue berries to another, gobbling away. I hear no chirping, chattering, or squawking, only bursts of wings to maintain balance on swaying branches. High notes from sparrows and wrentits, low notes from scrub jays and band-tailed pigeons, and middle-range notes from towhees and mockingbirds combine to create the unsteady, ever-changing music of the feast. One summer morning, I wake to so much feasting that the music isn’t music at all, just a blur of sound, one burst of flapping indistinguishable from another, so many birds in the elderberry’s canopy that the sound is at once monolithic, textured, and tremulous.

The deepest, richest sound comes from the band-tailed pigeons, skittish steel-gray birds that, despite being the size of crows, are extremely shy. They are as wary as their ubiquitous smaller relatives, the rock pigeons, are confident. In the morning, when the elderberry is in fruit, the band-tailed pigeons are the first to arrive… and the first to leave, comfortable in my yard when there’s little or no activity and daylight is only a suggestion on the horizon. Traveling in small groups, these mauve-breasted, yellow-footed pigeons clamber through the canopy, throwing out their wings again and again, each burst of flapping like the rumble of muted timpani.

Even when the band-tailed pigeons are high in the tree, their sudden departure doesn’t take much: an unfamiliar sound, a chattering squirrel, a dog door banging. I can’t help but think the pigeons are right to be wary. In the American Southwest, they are “harvested” in the tens of thousands each year, even though, in North America, their number has more than halved since 1966. Their close relatives, the passenger pigeons, were hunted into extinction for pies, feathers for women’s hats, and fun. My friend Phil, now more than eighty, told me a story of what passed for fun when his grandfather was a child in Arkansas in the 1890’s: At night, men went out with lanterns and shotguns and blasted away at the passenger pigeons roosting in the forest. There were so many pigeons in the trees that, when their shot-gunned bodies fell, they made thigh-high piles on the ground, where they were left to rot.

And so, early mornings when the elderberry is in fruit, I keep my dogs quiet beside me on the bed, taking pleasure in the sound of the band-tailed pigeons feasting to live and nest another year.

The elderberry’s bounty begins in spring, when the bare canopy greens with stems of soft, finely toothed leaves. The tree looks like an enormous bouquet, its dozen or so trunks crowded together like stalks of flowers that arch apart above an encircling hand. As the trunks curve toward the sky, they divide into smaller and smaller branches that produce umbels of tiny white flowers. As soon as the elderflowers open, every pollinator in the vicinity seems to know. Butterflies, moths, bumble bees, solitary bees, flies, honey bees and, of course, elderberry longhorn beetles alight on the flowery landing pads for nectar and pollen. For months each spring, the canopy swarms with insects. If the canopy has formed during a winter of plentiful rain, many of the branches trail all the way to the ground. When my daughters were young, they liked to lie inside this cave of leaves and flowers and look up, the sunlit cave walls glowing green like stained glass. And if there was a lull in the freeway noise and no helicopters flew overhead, my daughters could hear the buzzing pulse of the bees.

The insects’ handiwork appears over the course of several months as successive clusters of tiny green berries develop. Birds and squirrels monitor the berries’ progress, visiting the tree more and more frequently the riper the berries become. And then, one much-anticipated summer morning, some berries are finally ripe, and the feast begins: On a chorus of wings, the band-tailed pigeons swoop in. As they forage through the canopy, their bursts of flapping almost sound like applause. Then, a short time later, there’s the sudden shack shack shack of a scrub jay, and I hear the pigeons scatter. The jay stays on the tree for a while and eats alone—jays are assertive birds. Solitary low-pitched bursts distinguish the jay’s tenure on the tree. But then the jay relinquishes the canopy to towhees, wrentits, and sparrows, who flit through the canopy with shy bursts of middle- and high-pitched flapping. The birds feast long enough for my dogs to become restive beside me, demanding to be let outside. And once the dogs are in the backyard, squirrels scamper along the electrical wires and leap into the elderberry, seeming to enjoy its fruit the most when they can feast just beyond the dogs’ reach.

Such mornings continue almost into autumn. Despite the winter rains having ended sometimes five or six months earlier, the tree produces ripe berries every day for months. Each day has its own distinct elderberry music, and it lasts until that day’s ripe berries are consumed. Indigenous peoples of California call the elderberry the “tree of music” because of the whistles and clapper sticks the tribes make from its limbs. Tree of music. A perfect name in so many ways.

Then, all too soon, the music ends. Lying in bed in the morning, I hear only silence from the tree, the canopy now composed of withering leaves and lacey clusters of nothing more than stems once pendulous with berries. The freeway is the loudest thing around. The hum sounds like radio static, and it’s punctuated by the whine of sirens, roar of leaf-blowers, and screech of car alarms. These are what my morning sounds would be if not for the ones I’ve planted for in my yard: sounds of co-evolutionary relationships that have developed over millennia between Southern California’s native animals and plants—relationships typified by those of the elderberry and its wild visitors.

If each of my neighbors also planted an elderberry tree in their yards, our summer mornings could be symphonies of wings. But most of my neighbors eschew such music for the virtual silence of ornamental gardens. Some neighbors dismiss my landscaping efforts on behalf of wildlife, saying that we live in a post-wild world.

It’s true, we do: No place on Earth is unaffected by human activity. But co-evolutionary relationships between native plants and animals still exist. They are real. Our post-wild world has not erased or suspended these relationships, and we can plant our gardens to support them. The evolution of new relationships never stops, but it’s a slow process. Between the destruction of wildlands and the dominance of ornamental horticulture, I fear we are starving time-honored relationships faster than new ones can evolve. I fear that, for the next several millennia, we will have a world largely bereft of nature’s music.

But then, with the winter rains, the bare canopy of the elderberry leafs out. Seemingly overnight, the tree’s brittle tangle of branches transforms into a soft cloud of green. Umbels of blossoms open and shine in the sunlight. And the music begins again, giving me some hope for the immediate short term, countering some of the worry I feel about the world we are bequeathing to our children.

Generations from now, what sounds will people hear?

© Lisa Novick

Rain in the Anthropocene

by Charlotte Melin

Charlotte lives on the Cannon River, which flows into the Mississippi south of the confluence with the Minnesota at Bdote Minisota, a Dakota sacred site.

Rain briefly breaks the drought.
I open a window to hear
the sound of its fall on
dry leaves at night, to smell
the sweet scent wafting up
from the earth, anticipating
the scant greenness that will
come in the morning.
Too little to save the crops,
to quench the wildfires,
but enough for the moment
to breathe and look for
what can potentially be salvaged—
a habitable planet for our children,
a remnant of peace
in this asymmetrical world,
where it has also just rained
for the first time in Greenland.

© Charlotte Melin

River Fire, 2021

by Gene Berson

Gene lives in the northern California foothills in the Yuba River watershed. Everyone goes to the river. Like a temple, with its falls its rapids its green pools, it seems to restore everyone in a personal way. We feel our kinship through it.

After we were cleared to come back
we noticed burnt oak leaves,
caught in the updraft,
had floated to the deck, showing us
how close flames had come
like shards of scripture on blackened parchment
we’ve been trying to translate, numbed out
picking through the house and property.

The people we were
apparently left in a hurry, drawers half open,
dishes in the sink,
whole files pulled out of cabinets—
we went through this house trying to grab anything
we felt we couldn’t live without, that called to us
while we could hear the sound of hot wind
in the high trees. Death must suddenly show up
like that, us unprepared, snatching at our souls
flying around the room out of our bodies
like strips of celluloid flapping
free of old projectors
the movie screen gone blank.
We took off leaving any dignity behind.

Our house is still standing
with all the work it still needs,
my uncle’s paintings, family pictures
too many to take, my books,
my wife's crystals. . . .

Sixty homes burned and my god the poor animals
one friend had ash covered bear cub prints
pawing her car to get in.

I opened up my computer to read
fires in Siberia were breaking records
burning more acreage
than all the world’s fires put together.
Olympus in Greece, home
to the original games, burning.

Powder burns on our driveway
a flap of tarpaper torn off someone’s burning roof
balanced on my gutter, like a scout
sizing up the place,
and going down the stairs leading to the lower deck
we look out on tinder-dry weeds. Blackberries
crawl through a visible layer of ash,
too slow to be seen moving, reluctant refugees,
lugging small dark-green leaves on their crablike canes
as if it’s not too late.

© Gene Berson

Thirsty

by Kaylene Johnson-Sullivan

Kaylene lives in the foothills of the Talkeetna Mountains near Palmer, Alaska. She often rides her horse to the headwaters of the Little Susitna River, part of the larger Susitna River basin.

We have built a fence and gate
to keep animals in, people out.

I think about water that once flowed 
through the dried-up creek bed,

and the tree that stands a century old,
sentinel perch for generations of ravens, 

and the hubris of thinking it “ours."
If I could keep it wild

I’d have my ashes spread in the holler 
beside the horse we buried, 

in view of the pasture and mountains.
Once we’re gone from this place 

it will likely be sliced into parcels
like servings of cake.

Wild red currants in secret clumps 
in the shade of downed trees will be stripped and 

the pasture carved into a “subdivision” with
new fences and gates. 

Then I will rise to ride the bones 
of the old horse up the creek bed,

thirsty for the water that once
ran clear and free.

Previously published in Sisyphus

© Kaylene Johnson-Sullivan

Tree Frog

by Polly Brody

Polly lives in an exurban Connecticut town, about 500 ft. above sea level, about an hour's drive inland from Long Island Sound. Every year she listens from her window for the first chiming peep of spring hylas that give voice to a pond, just within hearing.

No longer than
my thumb’s last joint,
you wince as my scissors cut
that hosta stem you grasp.
I see your beige tremble,
just before the blind blades reach you,
and am glad.
Gently, I lift
both stem and you
away from the obscuring plant.
Your shadowy vale is lost
to a drench of sunlight,
yet you cling in stillness
save for your soft sides pulsing.
Tiny suede-skinned being
entire even to your toes,
each with its minute spatula
adhering you--
adhering you to whatever
is to come.

Previously published in the author’s collection Stirring Shadows

© Polly Brody

Message: Sitka Sound

by Stewart Florsheim

Stewart lives in the Sausal Creek-Frontal San Francisco Bay Estuaries watershed, which includes eight waterbodies. The area used to be inhabited by the Ohlone people -- a Native American tribe formerly known as the Costanoans.

When I first spot them
I’m not sure what they are:
large torches, perhaps,
flames tapering into a soft glow.
And then, as if someone shouted,
they soar from the branches,
scores of eagles scouring the Sound.
An otter, attentive, flips over on its back
to protect its morning catch.

The water is balance as it holds
the early light framed by the shore—
red-throated loons walking beside
herons and egrets, flowers with names like
pearly everlasting, river beauty, harebell.
A dolphin pops up its nose near our kayak
and does it again and again,
right to left and left to right, tapping out
an urgency from another world.

© Stewart Florsheim

Ravens at the Rim

by Richard Green

We stand on the rim of the Grand Canyon
on a glorious high altitude summer day,
sun-warmed, air-cooled, cumulus clouds passing
through the transparency of the deep blue.

Intoxicating--the clarity, the light,
the high dry air and the scent of pines.
Overwhelming--the vastness, the colors,
the depth, the distant sounds of water and air.
We are in a state of wonder,
experiencing in our modest way
the sublime.

Then unexpectedly, and right in front of us,
a big black shape floats up, almost at arm’s reach--
a raven, wings outspread like a black kite.
We refocus sharply on this bird and feel a new,
more intimate sense of wonder
as another raven floats up, silent, effortlessly,
wings outspread, followed by a third!

I look over the rail and see, far down,
a small flock of ravens assembling,
finding their place in the elevator of air.
The first ravens, high above, are plummeting down
to catch the updraft again.

We watch this spectacle of birds at play,
rising and diving as on a carnival ride,
amused and marveling at their clever abandon.
But I sense something more,
that they are the canyon too, as the rock
and the river, the currents of air
and the steep cliffs are the canyon,
their wildness remote and distant
from us as the chasm itself,
that they are an animate manifestation
of the vast inanimate deep,
the soul of the canyon speaking
in a whisper of ravens.

© Richard Green

From the Stag's Point of View

After Matthew Thorburn's poem and
Gerhard Richter's painting "Stag"

by Eric Chiles

Rain from Eric’s roof drains into the Monocacy Creek, a tributary of Pennsylvania's Lehigh River, which drains into the Delaware.

Uncharacteristically careless
now I sense you see me –
shadows that we normally are
to each other – through the wood's
protective web of branches, saplings,
brambles twined and laced as arboreal
armor for my survival and
your confusion, one hunting
a way through this labyrinth
whose twists are as instinctive
to me as puzzling to you who
have lost your senses in ordering
nature to less chaotic geometry
forgetting what nose and ear
find in the wind, not recognizing
how scent and motion betray
keeping me alive and you lost –
until this revelation.

© Eric Chiles

Cressing With Sophia

by Charles Weld

Charles lives about a half mile from the inlet to Owasco Lake, part of the Oswego River-Finger Lakes watershed which is part of Lake Ontario's greater watershed, Haudesaunee land until about 1790.

When Thoreau rowed his sister, Sophia, upriver to cress,
cress, I guess, meant picking leaves from stalks
of yellow rocket to cook like spinach, unless
the family ate raw greens which, I’ve read, is unlikely. Herb
of St. Barbara is the other name Thoreau used. The verb,
like nutting or a-berrying, part of a foraging vocabulary
that disappeared as wild fruits became property,
rights claimed by owners. He wrote I do not see clearly
that these successive losses are ever quite made up to us,
after the closing to pickers of some blueberry hill country,
the lost chances for health and happiness, not superfluous
but central to his lament. On a river outing up the Sudbury,
he, Sophia, and their aunt picked three pecks of barberry,
the river cutting cross lots, as he did on his unorthodox walks,
another practice that would have trouble surviving the century.

© Charles Weld

Five-Foot-Long Black Snake

by Charles Weld

Charles lives about a half mile from the inlet to Owasco Lake, part of the Oswego River-Finger Lakes watershed which is part of Lake Ontario's greater watershed, Haudesaunee land until about 1790.

Seated on a sunny path, Thoreau startled the snake,
and then was surprised himself, when head
and half its body rising, as if preparing to strike, instead
it slid up a slender oak sapling in retreat,
climbing zig zag, twig by twig, to the tree’s top
and there, extending itself straight out two feet,
coiling around a nearby pine, not to stop,
but to swing slowly overhead, tree to tree: pine,
oak, oak, pine. The distance in a straight line
from where it left the ground: twenty-five feet. He
called aversion to snakes an unnatural antipathy,
but probably knew few neighbors would agree
or, after flooding, understand his urge to undertake
rescues, ferrying serpents in his boat to safety,
ignoring the belief in their innate chicanery.

© Charles Weld

Landscaper’s Assistant Looks Down

by Stephen Wing

Wing, as he is known in his several overlapping communities, lives on the subcontinental divide near the watershed of Peavine Creek, once the territory of the Muscogee. His back-fence neighbor is the Lake Claire Community Land Trust, a neighborhood greenspace with a view of the downtown Atlanta skyline. He currently serves on its board.

All the modestly expensive,
lavishly landscaped
artificial gardens
of this overweight white man’s back yard,
all the concrete and clipped grass,
beds of perennials around the long blue
pool-cover, holly trees
along the low brick wall, all of it—
including my six bucks an hour—
all of it is worth
less than the four severed fingers
of a small, wet
brilliantly patterned toad
panting in the pinestraw, still in shock
from my too close,
too quick
shovel-thrust

© Stephen Wing

Cradled

"Something there is that doesn't love a wall"
Robert Frost

by Cathy Hird

For over thirty years, Cathy ran a family sheep farm on the edge of the spine of limestone known as the Niagara Escarpment. In 2018, she moved a little north and now lives sheltered under the same escarpment on the fresh water inland sea known as Waaseyaagami-wiikwed by the Ojibwe, the traditional keepers of this land.

The way you're being buried
some would think you have no place.
But something there is, I do believe,
that just adores a fence row.

Rocks hauled from the field
piled decade after decade, gaining
lichen, moss and humus, leaves
that fall and turn to dirt, cradled
in the crevices between.

Trees not cleared send roots beneath
your rocks, stretch up and out
home to squirrels and birds while
chipmunks scamper along the wall,
shelter in the spaces
cradled safe from fox and coyote.

Choke cherries line the edge, protected
by your rock from plow and haybine.
At their feet, wild strawberries flourish.
Grapevines find the soil beneath the stones
reach across, around, along the rocky pathway.
Raspberries find ground to harbor roots.
All that luscious fruit provided free.

Hawk perches on a branch above
watches field. Be careful, mouse!
Russet thrush flashes into view, hides again.
Blue jays hop from tree to tree while
chick-a-dee-dee-dee rings out, a cousin answers.

Cedar posts are here, and poles attached.
Woven wire to fence in sheep.
A barrier you are, I will admit,
but mostly, you feel like home.

© Cathy Hird

Origin Story

by Polly Brown

In retirement Polly has returned to a family place she’s known and loved all her life but never lived in full time. Just uphill from the Sandy River, in the Kennebec watershed, she’s continuing a weekly bird list her grandmother and mother started long ago.

I arrived at the door with a pailful
of water dipped from the pond’s
stemmy shallows, and Gram brought

a wide white soup bowl for me—
white so the least speck would show—
and a magnifying glass she kept near

for reading. Then she turned back
to the stove. Hunched over, I watched
a stick with jaws, six jointed sticks

for legs; watched punctuation whiz
around and back; counted the beats
of a heart in a see-through frog. Akin

to mine, the same life, urgent,
whirring. That morning I fell
into love more than soup-bowl

deep; fell through the pond’s own
trembling skin, to live with beetles
and leaches. Winter, I burrow

in mud. Spring, croak with joy.
Becomes What She Sees
remains one of my names.

© Polly Brown

Asters

for Alex

by Polly Brown

In retirement Polly has returned to a family place she’s known and loved all her life but never lived in full time. Just uphill from the Sandy River, in the Kennebec watershed, she’s continuing a weekly bird list her grandmother and mother started long ago.

This morning, after the mechanic across the river
revived our ancient car, I thought about batteries
and hearts, and hurried home—to find you

still asleep. So I’ve come out alone, to walk
where you don’t like walking, in the woods
where beavers left logs helter-skelter, hung

in other trees or sprawling unused, a danger
for anyone precariously balanced. “And a waste,” I hear
your voice say. “Rotten planning.” Downhill

by the brook, flooded, strangled spruce kept dying
long past the beavers’ departure, water’s drop—
lichen-festooned, root crowns heaved high.

When you’re with me you stand away
from all of this. Still, in this new meadow grown
in the old trees’ graveyard, I cross the brook

with a leap into thick grass, rich purple
asters. I gather change that’s blossoming
out of change, to bring back to you.

© Polly Brown