A Map to What’s Loved
Find the center of things—
this may be the house
or the heart
or a stone found on an Irish beach
while staring across the sound
to the Great Blasket Island
Consider topography
especially if
you have to climb
to find what you are looking for—
the exact point of curl in your child’s hair
the locket lost on a high trail
But topography
is never all—
what’s loved
may be right there at eye level—
a view through a window
or the first time you gave your son
permission to use a knife
to cut an apple
Follow roads you know
and roads you don’t
into the interior
be prepared
to spend nights
without shelter
to learn which trees nearby
love water
Consider how
when you find what you are
looking for
how you might retrieve it
or whether you will only
consider it
and leave it there
Remember how far
you can travel
in a day
how to resist
the urge to turn back
***
A Mother Stone Among the Ancestral Rockies
She sends green light toward the trail
From lichen on her worn and reddened curves.
She’s too old for vanity or pride.
Exposed, her igneous flow has
petrified and left her standing
in this field since the last Ice Age.
She is shameless, open as
a bowl. Open as a woman
can be. At her center, a space
that snow and rain will fill, and stir
the pine seeds blown in each autumn;
giving life to fairy shrimp and insects
too small for most of us to know by name.
She leans back beneath the ponderosa
pine. Things have broken off inside her:
a sandstone arch, a cover, a seam, where
once, at the bottom of the bowl, water held,
like cupped hands, in the spring rains.
And who would care if a boulder
fills with water or not? And empties
again? The crows, the bush-birds,
the wide-eyed mule deer, and a woman
passing by, called to her side by green light
glimpsed from the trail at mid-day.
***
Among Trees: A Litany
First the cycads
(sego palm
and gingko) then
conifers—the pines
and their kindred
among whom
only the tamarack
prophet begins to
sheds leaves.
Needles in their
fascicle packets
begin unfolding
exactly so many
each year. You can
still count them
on any tree; arrested
development or
perfection of form
and function?
Next, the catkin
bearers: willow, birch,
poplar (cottonwood
goes here), sometimes
bearing life alone.
Sometimes one tree
male, the other
female, with wind
as matchmaker (why
this singularity is
“primitive” among
trees and a sign of
sophistication
among humans
no one explains).
At last, the fruiting
sort—maple, oak,
hickory, linden,
the extended family
of the rose: an apple,
a peach, a plum,
a cherry—O generous
etcetera! Congratulations!
We have now arrived
at one hundred
million years ago.
Let us pray.
Kathleen Cain’s poetry has recently appeared in Medical Literary Messenger, the literary magazine for Virginia Commonwealth University’s school of medicine. She has work forthcoming in Coe College’s haiku magazine, Garden Quarto. Her work has appeared previously in Bristlecone. She is the author of two nonfiction books: The Cottonwood Tree: An American Champion, and Luna: Myth and Mystery. She takes a cue from Shakespeare in her approach to writing about Nature: “. . . tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything”—even though she knows things are tough out there.
Dear Kathleen, these are beautiful and true. Thank you!