/Credit: Robert Jordan

Politics

You can begin a hike arguing about neoliberalism, trying to figure out what it means, and after you have listened to your husband tell you about the Whigs and the Federalists, and Britain in the nineteenth century, and Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, and civil rights, and Clinton and the injustices of NAFTA, and the original meaning of liber, free, what that might mean in terms of generosity and open-mindedness certainly not operative at present when Scott Pruitt just became head of the EPA—goodbye EPA, goodbye wolves and bears, goodbye redwoods, goodbye tribal lands, goodbye water, goodbye air, goodbye the tattered remnants of life as it should be lived on earth, goodbye goodbye godbye, god be with you shattered forests, god be with you toxic waters, god be with you small anguishes, starved bent & twisted lives, the reasons for grief are nearly infinite—after you have listened you can both fall silent as you walk with this man you love, and notice the downed and leafless trees, the ant trails, which are lines of sifted dirt that cross the path heading from spiky dried reeds to more spiky dried reeds, notice an anthill climbing all the way to the top of a clump of daffodils that grow off the trail in a weedy field, choking and killing the flowers with its thousands-of-tiny-bodies formic acid, and looking up, acknowledge silently that there is a white-bellied hawk, yes, wheeling and calling above the pine trees   keee-ir   keee-ir   almost like a cat, and fleecy clouds that presage rain on what is still a sweet morning, and there are frogs hiccupping and spring peepers shrilling, invisible, somewhere around the lke, and all around you are tiny insects, the sun hitting their wings, like translucent diminutive angels.

 

Winter Day on the Whirlpool Trails

 

Where the power lines go through,

the red clay gullies and pits, not even

privet can grow fast enough to bind it.

We clamber down and up, and down and up,

and turn to enter the woods. Further along,

we come to broken glass, old brown bottles

nearly buried, a toilet choked with brush,

bricks, some pipes, some turquoise plastic coiling.

It’s just like that, here—people dump things

and they sink, protrude rusty and jagged

from the mud, or block the trail,

stained with leaf mold. To the side,

some withered Southern red oaks,

a blackjack oak, knobby trunks of trees

choked as they grew by spiraling vines—

Virginia creeper, poison ivy—

and leafless sweetgums with their little

sci-fi seedpods, clusters of loblolly pines.

Everywhere rotting, everywhere teeming,

moss like emeralds on the stumps,

the hollow logs. This is my home, this leaf-duff

and dereliction, where look—a vulture wheels

above the cedars, searching for what stinks.

Where a first tender violet, blooming

by my feet before Valentine’s Day,

signifies the seasons are in heat.

The great blue heron’s not here today,

standing motionless among the reeds.

But a turtle slides off a distant log, and sunlight

scatters like shot across the scum-slicked pond.

  

 

//

Ann Fisher-Wirth is the author of several poetry collections, including Mississippi (Wings Press), which is forthcoming in 2017; Dream Cabinet (Wings Press, 2012); Carta Marina (Wings Press, 2009); and Blue Window (Archer Books, 2003). Known for her interest in environmental literature, she is also the coeditor, with Laura-Gray Street, of The Ecopoetry Anthology (Trinity University Press, 2013). Fisher-Wirth has received fellowships from the Black Earth Institute, the Fulbright Foundation, and the Mississippi Arts Commission, among others. She teaches English and environmental studies at the University of Mississippi. She lives in Oxford, Mississippi. NWCC says thank you for the poems! 

A Norwegian review of The Ecopoetry Anthology can be read in this link.