HOMAGE | POEMS on a scrolling page

HOMAGE | NEW & SELECTED POEMS
Emily Hiestand, (Ebb Tide Editions, 2024)
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“Dazzling, engaging, superb poems” in which the poet “swings from earth and the quotidian to space and the larger connections of nature.” — San Jose Mercury News

The poems in Homage first appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Georgia Review, Southwest Review, Partisan Review, Hudson Review, and other literary journals, often in earlier forms.
Reviews


NEW & SELECTED POEMS

Two ways to read: On the scrolling page below. Or, on individual pages that advance like a book.


I. CHAIN OF BEING
ars poetica notes from the natural world



Likewise
 


The pond is like a mackerel skin tonight,
the mackerel like a beaded evening bag.
This is like that, that is like this, oh,
let's call the whole thing off and take it straight:
nothing is like anything else.
Even the parrot and the apish ape
mirror, mimic, and do like — unmatched.
to begin: algae, abalone, alewife —
each the spitting image of itself.
Likewise beetles (potato, scarab, and whirligig.)
Nothing even comes close to barrel cactus,
nothing is more original than a bog,
more rare than the cougar and crane —
save all the above named.

I've never seen anything like it — dustbowls,
deer, the descent of man and estuaries,
flakes of snow (no two like) fire,
flax, gannets, and gulls.
Honeybees and the Hoover Dam
are unique — there is nothing like a dam.
Ditto inbreeding, ice ages, industrialization,
joshua trees, lagoons, and the law
that to liken a lichen is tautological.
Indeed, the rule of diminishing simile holds
that all of these are idiosyncracies:
the Leakeys, legumes, maize, marsupials, and moose.

Virtually nothing is extraneous here —
not orchids, ooze, pampas, nor peat.
This is the world of plenitude and power —
every bit of it out of this world:
the rain and rattlers, sperm, swamps, and swans.
As now we inch toward an end — vectors
and a winter that figures to be like no other,
say the selfsame earth is to your liking,
and let us continue — yeast, yuccas, zoons,
all things like, beyond compare.




First published in The Atlantic, 1988
Homage: Travel Stories & Essays | Poems | Contents At-A-Glance



In a pine grove


Walking a pine grove
whose russet floor is kept by shade,
an itinerant crushes the carapace
and its resin of curing needles.
The palmer's way is led by no worn path,
no fixed allée, no maze of moss
nor long-enchanted root.
Only an open floor and a free swaying air,
only taking the pulse of the wood,
counting on a tutelary step,
and the hushed goodwill of evergreens.

Chance sun will show a body where to stay
before a shining web, lines played out from
some orb spider's holy gut — the creature
for the whole of life bound to a protean line.
Diffuse in the weald, invisible weavings,
that old-fashioned repair,
are ever spun from underbellies:
Silk glands! The spinnerets!
Bright as a sudden penny in the pines,
these silky lines are nursery,
are tensile web for germination,

are the lines of hibernation,
the lines for the binding of prey,
for escaping the hungry bluebird,
for sensing and sending a signal,
for flying on the wind (once into the sails
of Darwin’s fathoming Beagle),
for ballooning to and from oblivion,
for matting the earth in Fall
in showers of shed silk:
that's gossamer! —
the lines of a practical transport. 





First published in Green (Graywolf Press, 1989); revised slightly 2024
Homage: Travel Stories & Essays | Poems | Contents At-A-Glance



Chain of Being

Geukensia demissas


The carnivores and predators have top billing,
but in the subtle chain of species, the mussel
of the salt-water marshes invites admiration.
As marsh grasses are swept to sea, decomposing
and filling the water with phosphorus slurries,

our humble mussel begins to work. Three days
pass. The iron-rich phosphorous compounds
have now been filtered, firmly placed in a marl,
to be by mud–feeders released to planktons, who

will spoonfeed the fishes whose droppings sustain
the cord grass Spartina, who will again be compelled
to sweep to sea on the rigorous tide, releasing
fresh billows of self-shining phosphorous (from Latin:
torchbearer, bringer of light, the morning star.)

For diligence and distinction in this cycle,
for ceaseless, selfless action over millennia,
what commendation for the quiet mussel?
Constant of the intertidal realm; keeper
of balance for a planet of the Milky Way;

principal in the chain of beings who store
the carbon of civilizations (billions of tons),  
in the deep abyssal floor. Who has done more?
What honor — Palm d’Or, the Nobel, Chevalier —
can we bestow on the mussel of the marshes?


First published in Southwest Review, as “Chain of Species,” and in Ars Poetica, from Peregrine Smith Books; revised 2024
Homage: Travel Stories & Essays | Poems | Contents At-A-Glance



Midsummer


The morning glories on this shaded porch
have now outgrown the plain string harp
we stretched with them in mind in May —
before the seedling heads began to lift,

before the fleeting, first-leaf cotyledons came.  
Their daring tendrils now nose into open air,
unfazed, unscathed by the fact of sky-blue being
merely the scattering of light on dust.

And now, by these brave and longing vines,
by their shapely tangle and blooms going so
faithfully to seed, a small orb-weaver
has been drawn to this threshold of domesticity.

So silent her arrival, unseen, unbidden,
who knows just when, who could say when
this shaggy consecration began to spin
and to sun itself among the daily glories.

For hours, she appears to be a contemplative,
alert only to vibrations in the web.
But this is a stillness that is, for all the world,
the way of a fortunate and consummate hunter.

 


First published in Homage (Ebb Tide Editions, 2024)
Homage: Travel Stories & Essays | Poems | Contents At-A-Glance



Call and Response


How simply it begins, the gaze turned
by native bewilderment or inborn acumen
from the kind adults at table, from the sapien stream
of talk, to color, shadow, form, and light:
To the purple-blue-gray shadow cast by a bowl –

or the ivory column with its mute, self-evident
meaning — to the tracery of a branch defining
existence, definitively, in mid-air;
to the dark red leaf encased in wintry ice,
so calmly become a cold, gleaming beauty;
to the ur-theater of late afternoon light

religiously streaming, overpowering cliché
from under a bank of dark, low-lying cloud;
to the pale, breathing undersides of leaves
forecasting a distant, fast-arriving front;
to cattail seeds streaming towards germination;

and to the thickets and tangles into which
we see but partially, the unspoken-for patches;
and water surfaces shining, ever-skating
toward a horizon — all things of the world propelling
a call and response, tendering forms and shapes
for being and mind, for meaning, and for making.

First published in Homage (Ebb Tide Editions, 2024)
Homage: Travel Stories & Essays | Poems | Contents At-A-Glance



Leaves


On rain-slicked sidewalks in late fall,
the year’s leaves are flat-plastered,
as full of gloss as mussel beds
that cling to the bold coast of our region.
These are palisade cells collapsed
from absorbing the sun, and looking again —
beautiful orphans now undone.

Colors and shapes are always telling us.
The star-shaped leaves lighting this path
have fallen from a fragrant Sweetgum tree,
a species whose heritage woods were once
employed for the highboys and lowboys
that endured from whaling to prohibition
and into the dens sporting Fiberglas™ curtains.

There is comfort too: that flat stars
should quicken the ground, like the floor
around a mother's sewing machine —
each leaf some scrap of coming to age
that settles as quietly as cloth.
Their stems point in all directions,
and a rare, curled blade holds water.

First published in Green (Graywolf Press, 1989); revised 2024
Homage: Travel Stories & Essays | Poems | Contents At-A-Glance



Souvenirs Entomologiques

for Jean-Henri Fabre: "The Virgil of insects he was, and the Homer too."   


Incomparable observer, the close–seen picture burgeons:
behold, a dovetail moth comes culling the nerves
of a local field, seeking souvenirs in red and yellow flowers,

in scarlet pompons of bee-balm, in sow-thistle,
and flanneled mullein leaves, in the common evening
primrose of roadside and marginal flaxen places. 

Of her mothy response to blooms, we know better
than to say she admires them. Yet she seeks them
above all others, settling to brush herself in showy color.

And then, when ripe with eggs her taste for carnival fades. 
She flies now in search of the bedstraw green —
no other leaf, no other green for her wings of confinement.

Agreed then: of dovetail mothers we will not say she plays.
Save as light plays over a wave playing over a shore
where hours play in declension over a fully inflected earth.

The Passionate Observer, by Jean-Henri Fabre
First published in the Michigan Quarterly Review; revised, 2024
Homage: Travel Stories & Essays | Poems | Contents At-A-Glance



Travel Slides



And this is the sage–silver-green of live oaks who shade
the chaparral, and this the dull, pea–green of shaggy tamarisk,
and this is the pine whose resin once clung to our duffels,
and these are the jade green bones found deep in the flesh
of a fish. And this is the man who asked: “What possible meaning
has hidden beauty in the struggle for existence?”

And this is the coral that mimics the mossy antlers of elk,
and this is the convolute coral named, you will guess, for the brain.
And this is a picture of us, in one of those fields where, betimes,
we find an iron gate standing free where some road program failed. 
And this — this is upside down — can you tell it is the marketplace?

The oranges and egg breads are local; most everything else
imported in tins and frozen blocks to this sunny principality of cane.
And this is the sea cliff path, a baking reach where the lava basalt
grated our feet (we should have worn shoes), where fantastic forms
appear: here the head of a seal, here a window made by the sea to itself. 

How rough the lava grows. We should have worn shoes.
And what rubes we must look, as we wince and gingerly probe,
to the snails — that stream of phosphorescent dots —
who are crossing on the softest foot, from one tide pool to another 
without complaint — and to the sea with its high threshold of pain.

                     



The man referred to on line 5 is Marston Bates, and the question is adapted from this passage in The Forest and the Sea: "This theory gains plausibility when, on a Pacific atoll, you have opened a parrot fish just roasted over coals from coconut husks, and find, not prosaic fish bones, but delicate bits of jade green embedded in the white flesh. What possible meaning can this have in terms of the struggle for existence." 


first published in The New Yorker, August 1995; revised slightly, 2024
Homage Travel Stories & Essays | Poems | Contents at-a-Glance



Voyage in the Everglades
piloting north from Flamingo, Florida


The channel winds upon itself,
opal gleams are overhung with greens,
and no line on the chart corresponds
to this long, ever more sinuous passage.
We are traveling a hairline creek
that mingles with a slurry of marl.
In this can-can and coincidence of being,
we never know when some other face,
flushed by our motion, will rise to meet us.
Unpredictable rhythms school us —
the splash of fish, the settling of wing —
refining our notions of plot and drama.
The radio crackles with questions
garbled from a distant craft:
"...something something edible?" is the question. 
"Yes, but something something..." is the answer. 
Solitude hums through a slew of mud rushes,
through stiff flags and root tangles caked
with a convolute of oysters.
A velvetseed bush brushes the boat.
Mute things shimmer in the slow red sun
as along the reeking shoal a white heron
hunts hypnotically: how is a creature
immaculate in a field of decay?
This long marshy peninsula is a cleansing,
ever unburdening itself in aquatic filters
and constancies of light,
in swamp-angels and swamp-gums
in bonefish and brackish nurseries —
its population all specifics for clarification: 
for minds no less than waters, and so deftly
that we know what has happened only
when we emerge from the purling glades
to the pancake houses, the premiums,
and the octanes with their rainbow slicks.



First published in Homage, 2024
Homage Travel Stories & Essays | Poems | Contents at-a-Glance



SECTION II.
REGIONAL AIRPORT
places and discoveries

The poems in this section are set in two places. The first is my childhood town of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, home to scientists from across the U.S. and Europe, along with engineers, attorneys, government officials, and others who formed the Manhattan Project and its post-war research labs. This was a new, hastily built town — cosmopolitan, sciency, and focused on the future. And secondly, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, home to storytelling relatives who were school teachers, farmers, lawyers, writers, musicians, deacons, journalists, and postmasters. Theirs was a world of abiding connection to place, family, history, learning, and nature. They also followed the imperatives of their faith, and, like the modernists in Oak Ridge, found ways to help advance civil rights, at a time when that was not the norm in their region. These poems are written in gratitude for both childhood worlds.




The Moon Winx Sign
Traveling from Atom City to Tuscaloosa,1950s


Are we there yet? The neon crescent moon
with its neon blue eye and sly smile, illuminating
the night above the Moon Winx Motel, was the sign
that we nearly were — that we’d begun the final mile
of the trip from our city of science into the South.
The neon eye winked open and shut, and “winks”
was spelled (incorrectly, by adults!) with an “x,”
a mark that could mean so much: both the known
(“x marks the spot”), and the unknown, to solve for,
also danger and wrong on signs and exams,
and yes, love and kisses at the close of letters.
The vastness of “x” in “Winx” seemed just right.
Of course the turn onto our grandmother’s road
would be marked by a special spelling, by glowing light,
by a neon moon descended to shine on the entrance
to the Crescent Ridge Road on which she lived.

We were almost there. Only the driveway crunching
under the tires of our family’s car meant we were closer
to the Gothic-shaped radios, the wonder cabinet,
the sheaves of saved, sewing-pattern tissues,
and the lenses that magnified the word of our people.
Their driveways were paved in river pebbles,
a fluid pelt, powdered by drifting clay, then washed
by rain to the sheen of salmon and pearls. Taken
from the Tombigbee River, the cool, silk-smooth stones
could close as snug as pockets around bare feet.

There we made a game called Going to the Moon —
looping red rubber bands on gimcrack rockets,
shooting the balsa wood ships with cellophane wings
into the sky, then craning our necks — wowed
by flight. As the rockets returned to earth they fell
into the blankets of kudzu covering, softening
whole trees, houses, woodlands, gullies, and barns.

The land, we learned in time, had been the land
of the Creek (rightly, the Muscogee Alliance),
and an earlier people who built the solemn,
now silent earthen mounds that rose nearby,
holding time and absence. The relic mounds
were treated reverently, but some piece of time
was missing, altogether unknown, or hushed,
and now they had gone (where and why?).

We didn’t then know how to ask, and the land —
it was their land for two thousand years — had become
the home of collards, cotton, Scots-Irish and African
stories and songs, along with soft arms, biscuits,
and the cognitive dissonance that was our inheritance:
the pursuit of happiness / trails of tears,
all men created equal / “whites-only” signs,
life, liberty / bound and sold,
the new world sorrows, horrors that were ours to end —
in every part of the land, we came to understand,
from sea to shining sea — and we are not there yet.


About the Muscogee Nation | The Mounds of Alabama’s First People
Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America, Keisha Blaine
Northeastern Law Civil Rights & Restorative Justice Project | Burnham-Nobles Archive
Hymn


First published in Green (Graywolf Press,1989); revised 2024
Homage: Travel Stories & Essays | Poems | Contents at-a-Glance




At the Movie Theater, 1950s
early economic theory in Oak Ridge


At the movies at that time, if you ordered
two Cokes (Co-colas, we called them),
a teenage boy in a short red jacket would display
the bottles, holding them up, one in each hand —
pause for effect – then upend and immerse
the bottles into two red cups, simultaneously.

So much was happening:
the boy; his high-wave hairdo; a brand name
in cursive white on the bright red cups.

At nine my eyes were inches above the counter.
I could see the boy’s sure hands and his eerie
calm as the foaming colas rose in their cups,
rose to the rims, and then to above the rims
and thendid. not. overflow.

So much was happening:
the colas were in — and also not
in? — the cups.

At that time, in that early American era
when I was nine, there was no explanation
for what I had seen. The term convex meniscus
lay far in my future — and the boy merely lifted
the empties high, as if in triumph,
then placed them softly in a wooden crate.

So much was happening.
The sleek counter of glass and chrome.
A kind of victory. Was time involved?

The two tapering cups were placed before me.
I put two buffalo nickels on the counter,
heard the clink of alloyed metal
on glass and the purchase was made:
nickels for drinks was the transaction.
Everything else — the several shades

of red, one darker than the other;
the boy’s impromptu flair,
his pompadour; the sound of glass
in the worn wooden crate; and the new,
still formless question in my mind —
was free. All of that was free!

First published in Homage (Ebb Tide Editions, 2024)
Homage: Travel Stories & Essays | Poems | Contents At-A-Glance




Searchlights over Atom City
, 1950s


When a car dealership opened or a carnival came
to the unfarmed fields outside our science town,
the night was full of searchlights — columnar beams
crossing slowly like shining scissors, with a light
that pierced the evening fog, brightening clouds,
and canopies, then tapering softly into space.
We learned this light was measured in candlepower.

Some people in town followed the beams, for fun.
We begged our father to drive us, which he did
one night, and my reference then, staring at lights
from out a backseat window was the three kings
following the star of wonder, star of night,
in a stately, ceremonial minor key,
and the pentameter of camels’ hooves.

As our car pulled onto the grassy parking field
we saw the source: a set of carbon arc lamps
the size of kettle drums, on movable gimbals
bolted to a flatbed truck. A customized rig
with operators, men in caps standing watch.
I wonder now why a klieg light rig like that
wasn’t wonder enough for me at the time.

But the ethereal beams that called us into the night
had confirmed in my first philosophy that somewhere
there was a mother ship, alien and angelic,
a radiance fused from science, heaven, knowledge,
and joy. This was the indivisible light from the core —
and could hardly be transported on a flatbed truck
along back roads to towns on blue highways.

It would be some years before I understood —
that’s exactly how the radiance is transported:
by men operating gimbels, by a woman
steering a skiff across the bay, by elders
in ink-dark robes, by uncles throwing horseshoes
in the shade, by a child turning logic into code,
and by all those who are traveling light.


First published as “Candlepower,” in Green (Graywolf Press, 1989); revised 2024
Homage: Travel Stories & Essays | Poems | Contents at-a-Glance



Planting in Tuscaloosa

for Frances Webb (Callahan) Watkins

Three women are walking in Alabama.
My mother and I help my grandmother walk
around the field where she planted and raised.
As we circle the land I think of the way
a woman with child will sometimes caress her girth.
My uncle's tractor combs the deep red clay.

Now she wears a housecoat.

Summers, I stayed with her and rode the glider
on a shaded porch enclosed by lilacs.
I watched her wave a paper fan printed
with pictures of Jesus in unbelievable colors.
She waved away the sulphur smells that blew
at night from the Warrior River Paper Mill.

Once a man reading Sunday papers
in my bed asked me if I had page twelve;
I said I didn't have it. Then he asked
for page fifty; I said I didn't have it.
Then he asked for page seventy-three
and I said, "Go Fish," and we laughed
for ten minutes and made love and laughed.

Those laughs were courtesy of my grandmother.
She played Go Fish with me for hours,
managing a dumb wedge of cards
while I was mesmerized by learning
the distinctions between diamonds and hearts. 
How could any adult love a child enough
to play a game like Go Fish for hours?

Now she calls us to her room.

Every summer more trees on her land
were covered by the kudzu vines that grew
taller and taller than the tree men with machetes.
A lens on her table magnified the word.
Afternoons, the women snapped beans in Sister's
parlor and watched “As The World Turns” on TV.

Snap. Ping. Into the metal colanders.
I tried always to get the whole string off,
counting how many were right, two, then a goof.
How did she get the beans to snap so,
and always get the whole string off
and watch television and talk all the while?

Now she is heaped with roses and gladiolas.

Two women are walking in Alabama.
My mother and I walk arm and arm in her field.
The tractor harrows and dust begins to rise.
I stand ankle-deep in the field.
I am given her porcelain pitcher to keep.
Bits of clay cling to my feet.

 



First published in Green (Graywolf Press,1989); revised 2023; anthologized in Working the Dirt, ed. by Jennifer Horne;
Video: reading of “Planting” for “Mid-Week Poetry Break”
Homage: Travel Stories & Essays | Poems | Contents at-a-Glance


Regional Airport
flying from Tuscaloosa to Boston


The terminal has twenty molded, plastic seats
and a mural that peddles the whole magical system:
flight lines as urgent as the marks of Lascaux — 
crisscrossing the country over which levitation will happen,
an enormous cat's cradle spanning from sea to sea.
The air outside is clear but for a harrier hawk
making lazy circles in the sky: We know we belong
to the land, and the land...


As our flight lifts, the plowing commences below
for corn and okra, that curious crop with curved
green seedpods pointing skyward, ladies fingers,
so called. From this bird's-eye on high I see,
we all see, how the land recedes into shapes:
first the big agricultural patchwork,
then commemorative stamps,
then a weightless idea above the clouds.

Wings fly in the cabin.
Men and women wear jackets with wings.
Soon I drink from a wingéd cup,
eat with a wingéd fork and spoon,
call a woman with wings on her suit,
press a wingéd napkin to my mouth.
Aloft along one of the lines rising, rising
like a home run going going over the fence
and out of the Black Warrior watershed.

In that harrowed place, a red acre
will bear a body on its earthly rounds.
There is a stand of olive trees, trundled as slips
from dry Demopolis (near Eutaw), and beds
of our mothers' established vinca spreading
their constant tangle, defeating erosion, dark
and flowering by season. There scuppernongs
last bloomed and splayed an obscure aristocracy
in the sun. A woman long dead was a child in their
shade, and she the soft-armed ruler of memory.

In the shining city where this flight will land,
untold souls have arrived from afar, have trembled
in new rooms when quakes roll from the blue hills
into this good city’s glacial bowl. With every flight,
did they pray that other lands, voices, scents,
selves, need never end, even as fresh balms come,
as they do, to appease the long leave-takings.



First appeared in The Atlantic,1988, revised 2024
Homage Travel Stories & Essays | Poems | Contents At-A-Glance



SECTION III,
THOUGHT EXPERIMENT
questions

Advance by scrolling, or select any poem in any order on this page.




This is Something Simple


This is something simple — tangerine peels
shredded on the counter like rocking saucers
with butter-white insides and bits of string.
But for some peculiar reason the skins
remind me of Handel speaking of his Messiah:
"I did think I did see all Heaven before me."
These peels are the shavings of Heaven,
certainly not the orchard agape with music
of spherical fruits, but still, real relics,
fragrant and recently of the garden.
I stare at them hard, up close, as though my eye
were to a keyhole. What could Handel have seen?

Perhaps what Dante saw in the blinding vision
of Paradise — light unfolding unto light —
and the one millisecond, as we might say,
of pure illumination. Or perhaps something
vast and geographical like the landscapes
of Frederick Church — a spectacle
of chasms and plateaus, and always a river,
a shining serpentine leading to... good lord,
even the needles on the promontory pines
are absolutely realistic, with flecks
of sunset on each tip. You have to admit
there is something appealing about a gigantic vision.

But sooner or later, the visions all go
to something so brilliant it can't be described, save
as blinding light, in hyperbole after hyperbole —
with cymbals, shrieks, and releases of doves.
And another thing — after the leavens of truth,
mystery remains, much the same as the anecdote
of the trolley and the village clock,
supposed to explain relativity, but itself
so mysterious as to require explanation.

Myself, I look at these peels and work from there.
Say these fruits and the television, the Rockies,
Hiroshima, Easter eggs, the constellation Orion,
and Peter finding arrowheads at the lake,
whooping at the luck of each sharp blue edge,
which he could hold in his hand easily
as lunch money — say all of it could be connected
by me or a greater mind — there, you'd have it.
These are pleasing skins. What nice, ruddy color.
Now they'll go in the compost, then to the garden,
and tomatoes will grow next year if the Spring isn't wet.



First published in The Hudson Review, 1987
Homage: Travel Stories & Essays | Poems | Contents At-A-Glance




At the Pavilion
, Newport


Pavilions abound in this old whaling town.
This one ennobles a seaside park, a sward
with a marginal wood alive with Pearly Eyes,
the small satyr butterfly who roams the forests.

The columns of the pavilion are Tuscan, old
upright, and unfluted, as down by the seawall
a nautical legend holds a spyglass, one bronze
arm outstretched toward the mnemonic waves.

These smooth, calmest of columns embody ideas,
do they not: of law, devotion, order, strength,
of the true face we long to give the world.

And in their simplicity they show how light
will travel a surface from sunlit white to greys:
dove, charcoal, and into deepest shadow.

You can think about things in a stately pavilion.  
You’re expected to think about things here —
in a colonnaded space, with a serious sea nearby.

And so we ponder: could we come to live
on the earth as well as the small Pearly Eye?
Of course, it seems unlikely: as one of us

is small, short-lived creature with wings,
evolving coherently with its forest surround;
the other the sapien maker of unintended

consequences, of whom the ancient Greeks
were already using the word deinos, their word
for clever, awesome, uncanny, and fearful.

And in this are we not being being itself?
Eyes, ears – all fitted to the earth;
a recent apex in a wondrous world.

That being would risk a sapien creature for whom
experimentation is a natural act,
reveals how daring creation must be, at core.

A "venturing" Hölderlin called it. Open-ended,
neither rule-bound nor chaotic, Spinoza
said, but creative within evolving forms.
This he called Natura naturans.

An idea, Ernst Bloch notes, that "presupposes...
a notion of Natura abscondita, hidden
nature pressing for its own revelation.”

Thus "nature in its final manifestation
lies within the…future of those alliances
mediated through humanity” and being itself.  

To find future alliances, we can turn
neither to the pre-human planet for a script,
nor sanction all possible human doings:

the mediation is neither rule-bound, nor chaotic.
It must resemble “the…discipline of the artist
as described by Coleridge: ‘If the artist
copies mere nature, the Natura naturata,

what idle rivalry!...Believe me,’” the lake poet says,
’you must master the essence, the Natura naturans,
which presupposes a bond between nature…
and the soul” of a human being fully human.



First published in an earlier form in Green (Graywolf Press, 1989); revised, 2023
Homage: Travel Stories & Essays | Poems | Contents At-A-Glance


GLOSSARY

natura naturans “There are, Spinoza insists, two sides of Nature. First, there is the active, productive aspect of the universe…from which all else follows. This is what Spinoza, employing the same terms he used in the Short Treatise, calls Natura naturans, ‘naturing Nature.’” — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

natura naturata — ”The other aspect of the universe is that which is produced and sustained by the active aspect, Natura naturata, ‘natured Nature.’ Nature is an indivisible, eternal or self-caused, substantial whole — in fact, it is the only substantial whole. Outside of Nature, there is nothing, and everything that exists is a part of Nature.” — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

natura abscondita — “Nature that is hidden…dwelling in inanimate matter.”




Thought experiment for A and B



In the museum, the model brain was blue,
with two molded lobes that swiveled on
sweet brass hinges, akin to geodes in
the Hall of Gems — all in all a beauty

for shape and the finely wrinkled surfaces.
But in time we knew that the living brain
is plasticity, making, and remaking,
a lifetime of emergence and distillation.

And that here, thought experiments can be formed.
In this one, a pair of entangled photons — A
and B — are far away from one another,
as far away as the homeland in a ballad.

A now wanders the heavens, on Neptune, say,
or Andromeda, while B, floats in a glass
in the shady garden they once shared.
But if the spin of particle A is changed —

mark this wonder — the spin of B changes too.
Simultaneously! No time is needed for this change
in basic reality to travel the fathom of space.
The message leaps over all time and space.

And this is science, quantum’s uncanny rules.
And so it is, my dear one (oh love, where are you now?),
that we know, we know, that distance is moot:
that A and B are never apart, no never.


First published in Green (Graywolf Press,1988); revised 2024
Homage: Travel Stories & Essays | Poems | Contents At-A-Glance




On Nothing


The problem is the dissection problem.
Is it too much or too little love for the world
that moves one to despair in this life about
the despair of nothing after life, which this
life briefly — badly — interrupts?
It is true, that nothing is unfamiliar to us,
accustomed as we are to linoleum, wool snoods,
hands in pockets feeling the working hip bone.
But nothing is not despair, nor dark, nor pain;
it is none of these, and that is the point.
So if driven by fear of nothing, despair
is a simple mistake, a bit of a joke.

And what a waste of the gaping something to think
that because it is over soon, it is a groaning effort
to haul the sun each morning, to scurry around
a pyramid of footstools, improbable beings, frantic
as mimes to prop up marvels that wobble toward
drains or manholes. And too, it's unclear that eternity
has claim to meaning, or that if we had longer —
forever say — we could do better than we do
at five in a wagon, at eighty brushing the hair
from the forehead of a new youth. Eternity
seems an unlikely place to look for more.
Those twin prongs of before and after seem
merely to hold the middle ground like skewers
on summer corn so we may bring it tidily to our lips.
                                                                                          
In fact, we don't know that there is nothing.
All that we are and all that we aren't — it's not that.
The process of oceans grinding shells to sand
and sucking it back for bottom dwellers —
it's not even that. Zero is our invention,
an idea for which there is no evidence.
The great metaphor of empty space is false,
full of red suns rising in every direction.
A vacuum is light. A leg severed is memory.
A child unborn is aching regret or relief.
An accident avoided is a picnic by the road
with Dairy Queen burgers in thin tissue wrappings.

Except that we think of it, and on occasion,
groping for a nameless quarter, will feel the pull
of a thing beyond reckoning. But to think of it, even
to name it nameless means: that is not what we face.
Either our minds are famously unreliable
and we should get on with folding napkins and sheets
steaming from the iron, or our thoughts are not aliens,
rather emitted from nature like shad-roe, oxides,
uranium and burls. If so, these conceptual visions
of nothing, at which we excel, are pictures
of home, to be admired more stringently.


Selected for Best America Poetry1990, edited by Jorie Graham
First published in
The Hudson Review, 1989, revised slightly, 2024
Homage: Travel Stories & Essays | Poems | Contents At-A-Glance




Infants with Delirium tremens
born in withdrawal                                                  

                  

In a breathtaking world
grace is pronounced when the sun
on the side of a hot aluminum boat
fulfills its telos in a twinkling, 
coaching the child to similar radiance.

A best guess: we are at home in the world; 
the light in maples sings its light song
into our ears; we may study slender boats
of leaves, rising and falling on ponds
with confidence; and each bit of home

is rare, rare as the art of invisible weaving,
already rare when we were children.
Experimentum tremendum, this nursery
that suffers the heart. Come messengers, 
place their wafer–thin names on our tongues.



First published in Homage, 2024
Homage: Travel Stories & Essays | Poems | Contents at-a-Glance

“Not in entire forgetfulness / And not in utter nakedness, / But trailing clouds of glory do we come” — from “Ode, ”by William Wordsworth



On Manitoulin Island
  
Lake Huron, Ontario  


We have come so far north, we are in another country.
There is no language here, so we listen to the loons,
and when we cease to say loon, tree, star,
the nameless return to their original state, as though
the rule of speech had never singled them out.

We are not wrong to pluck from the night sky a “star” —
to translate a burning mass into a sound.
Unspoken, the night sky is a spilled necklace. 
So we say the cygnet, the swan, the charioteer
and darkness is restrung into maps for pilots,

and wishes — makes no difference who you are —
the words as helpful and handy as pocket knives.
But here, we have climbed a rocky escarpment
to a lookout where the boreal appears, a vast
velvety pelt, flowing as far as the eye can see,

and far beyond. Before this scale, we grow
as quiet as the contemplatives who reason
that anything minds can think or say about, say,
reality, cannot be wholly, precisely, what it is,
but what we, in particular, perceive.

Such judicious humility, about mind, by mind!
Could that be reason’s pinnacle? From this high cliff
we follow the trees (who, we’ve learned, are speaking
among themselves, signaling in a latticed tongue),
until they meld into the pale-blue visible horizon.


First published in Green (Graywolf Press, 1989) in an earlier form; revised 2023
Homage: Travel Stories & Essays | Poems | Contents At-A-Glance




Earth's Answer                              
           


Another night of Galileo arguing with William Blake —
the one with an angel in his tree, believing
"Where humans are not, nature is barren."
The other, il saggiotore, and curious Venetian,
pointing politely to his optical tube:
If the gentleman would look out the window,
at the three Moons of Ellipses . . .
No more sleeping this night, so rising I struggle with bards. 

One heard the furnace, Orc-rending an ocean,
all Beulah weeping. And one saw the revolution. 
Long has creation been taken as that live tongue,
telling in crumbling ores and recumbent folds,
in fugitive colors and the long clear combs of the sea. 
The world’s plenum, indifferent as it may be, sounds
as siren and provocateur on the drum of our whorled ears,
down dainty canals made by thunder and sighs.

Yet loosed as we are from the eerie circuitry of ants,
we wander, and wandering weave a connective tissue.
Even Galileo's descendants, in the deep sweet dream
of objectivity weave — as once a physicist,
dismissing metaphor and all its errancy, said,
by way of illustration: "The planet is only
a tennis ball, with a bit of fuzz for life.”
I did not chortle, I did not mock, I sympathized.   

Numberless, the natures of a world that keeps faith
and does the astronomer's will as well.
As first light comes, the mortar and pestle on my sill
grow red in the sun, burning as the need to know.
The colors look ripe to be taken, and I could use that red,
that unhurried crimson, salmon, sanguine bloom.
Only lead us not, we pray, into petty thieving.

 

first published in The Carolina Quarterly, 1989; revised 2024
Homage: Travel Stories & Essays | Poems | Contents At-A-Glance




Night Rain in Streetlamp Light  
    


A cone of streetlamp light
comes down
to ground,
a mercury beam on a swirl
of late night rain,
an airy bight
of stored-into-sensible heat. 
It is a play
of thermals rising,
of motion spun from our sun,
from the Coriolis
effect and cooling poles.
Call the rain a sweeping
scientia, knowledge
culling
for a right of way, gliding
on gravity,
sliding
into the funny bone of
emerging
coincidence.
Could consciousness
be inherent
in being,
in the whole of the world,
pre-dating
our kind of mind?
Does it saturate the universe
like rains, infusing
dunes and coastal forests,
barrier islands, cordgrass
cobble beaches
and boulders,
rockweed garlands alive
with glisten,
and even this slab,
asphalt and mineral-sweet,
this laboratory:
our street?


First published in Homage (Ebb Tide Editions, 2024)
Homage: Travel Stories & Essays | Poems | Contents At-A-Glance



SECTION IV,
FRAGMENTS

“As a philosophical form, the fragment reflects the conditions of modernity … the fragment emerges as a seed.” — commentary on Novalis, by philosopher Kristin Gjesdal

Advance by scrolling, or, select any poem in any order on this page.




Movie Review
bricolage from The Washington Post


Throughout, there is a credible chemistry
as they travel to her home near the coast,
and a measured melodrama, by which the film
suggests that for all its foregone conclusions
this time we have the advantage of hindsight: 

We can observe, firsthand, events from years ago:
the interpreter who saved more than one life;
the season of remarkable flight; the application
of glitter; the humbled prodigal returning —
all parts of a self, invisibly coming together.

This debut, based on real life experience,
presents a small, but encompassing portrait
by virtue of the larger theme in this quiet,
unflinching story: it is not magic —
but how life felt in a certain time and place.

To an extent, it’s also about ever exploring
the same life — now seeing your father’s courage
fully, your own slowness to learn — and it will
barely matter if you can’t easily discern all
that is happening at first. Now in theaters.



First published in Homage (Ebb Tide Editions, 2024)
Bricolage sourced from reviews mentioned in this article in The Washington Post
Homage: Travel Stories & Essays | Poems | Contents At-A-Glance



Tall Order
bricolage from The New York Times Book Review


Dressed as an inspector, revealing clues
on the first fully modern campaign, the issue
is nourishment, and the irony of an attempt
to warm well-springs of joy with salvos
at the flaws of the only known world.
The ancient words are plain enough:
we are to become as little children.
This tall order and the nature of the effort
resemble the work of a sheltered person,
who turned to largely private ends,
who has seen at last that the price
of safety, of normality, is surely a mistake.
Roughly speaking, a person now
pressing on the doors of authenticity,
which, after something of a mystery,
bolder than the last and, in its sweep,
laying bare self-deception, may be found.
When one seeks to describe what has
happened, no names are used, and
halfway across the river, under pale skies,
we dare to whisper to one another
that honeyed phrase: a new life.


First published in Green (Graywolf Press,1989) in an earlier form; revised 2024
Homage: Travel Stories & Essays | Poems | Contents At-A-Glance




This is a world


This is a world on the brink of collage:
a maker supplied with magazines and glue
and sticky fingers — enormous in proportion
to the images torn! Each hand may hold
a motorboat, a balcony, a quarter–acre of corn.
Wondrous to behold: the infinite possibilities
of scrap as here an eye is released from its locus,
here a pattern, once bound in the logic of camouflage,
stands alone, pure principle of novelty. 
Each bit is become a ragged island, deckle–edged
in the maker’s mark. You'd be surprised to see
how delicately our curious giant tears these pieces
freeing them to flutter, as they will, to a table.  
Some of the bits are torn triangular, some
circles, some into stars as yet unnamed.
But each is bright and realistic and nothing
is unprincipled: the fall of shards, the piling-up
of color into momentary meaning merely
improbable as an unassisted triple play.


First published in Homage, 2024
Homage: Travel Stories & Essays | Poems | Contents at-a-Glance




Half rhyme


Half rhyme, 1/2 scientific thought,
partial bushwhack and contemplation,
50/50 rant and social observation,
semi-ecstatic nature walk,
6 of one half-hum. Not the zeal
that sunders the quarky neutron,
nor the force that lights new dawn

and creases courtlands in the field,
but more than half made with glue,
unguent, solvent, what have you,
that acts upon the too many halves
and halves not, but renders for laughs,
for a breath, a split second or two,
the whole ball of wax, half true!



first published in Green (Graywolf Press,1988)
Homage: Travel Stories & Essays | Poems | Contents At-A-Glance




Quiet Woman


When quiet woman
appears she fills my ears
with morning glories.
Morning glories
grow out of my ears —
big blue trumpets
in those soft canals.

My hearing is better
than a geezer's,
but the dog howls
when the telephone rings.
I cannot answer
with a flower in my ear.
With a flower in my ear,

I hear only wind
and the scuttle of trinkets
she tosses my way:
charms, glimmers, scars,
bits of beforetime
words and, erelong,
worn ones for renewal.

The clichés come
to be redeemed,
the ancients amain
(at full speed) to be
reclaimed, offering
both shrift (forgiveness)
and swevens (dreams).


First published in Green (Graywolf Press,1989) in an earlier form; revised 2024
Homage: Travel Stories & Essays | Poems | Contents At-A-Glance



Conjuring
bricolage  


The years weigh heavily
and the lesson is jolting,
inseparable from the human quest
to see through each other’s eyes. 

The closest parallel is
a confession, from her youth,
passionate with regret,
as worlds are leaving her behind.

This is free-flowing conjuring
as she begins to make a new life
within an old-growth, forested land
and the living memory of history.

Based on a true story.

 

Fragments drawn from these reviews in The New Yorker
Homage: Travel Stories & Essays | Poems | Contents At-A-Glance




Story
bricolage from the New York Times Book Review

In the American parlor, a momentary nostalgia
for old homes bright with detailed objects
and words adequate to represent the interior:
screen, chaise, keys in place, devotion,
a modest reserve, the meaning-giving law.
Now, with avalanches of information,
we must set forth for shelter, human shape,
safety, eye contact, purpose, pantries.
Hopelessly removed from the prime object,
we must interpret weak signals from
whatever nature throws our way, and less
than fully controlled, in a system embedded
in a system, discern the way of the world.

There’s an even more ancient story: of flecks
of clay in the estuaries of an evolving earth
where life as we know it today rose to more
hospitable planes, raining down from time
to time, causing delight in our ranks.
When we tell the stories, we are fighting
for our lives, and in the break and tide
of rhythm, the pulling for breath and cries
of words leaping to sensibility, may begin
to take on form — as when a city is founded
and a quarter, a portion, is allotted to promise.
What harm to thrill to sudden cloudbursts,
the utmost pressure for fresh meaning?

First published in an earlier version in Green (Graywolf Press,1989); revised 2024
Homage: Travel Stories & Essays | Poems | Contents At-A-Glance


Acknowledgements

Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following editors and publishers in whose publications many of the poems in Homage first appeared (many in earlier versions).


The Atlantic, Peter Davison, and David Barber, poetry editors
Agni, Askold Melnychuz, founder, editor
Carolina Quarterly
Graywolf Press, manuscript selected by Jorie Graham
The Georgia Review, Stanley W. Lindberg, editor between1977-2000
The Hudson Review, Paula Deitz, editor-in-chief
Milkweed Editions, several volumes edited by Laure-Anne Bosselaar
The Nation, Katrina vanden Heuvel, editorial director, publisher
New South Books, volume edited by Jennifer Horne
The New Yorker, poetry editor Alice Quinn
The New York Times, Op-Ed Page, assigning editor David Shipley
Partisan Review, Rosanna Warren, edition editor
Prairie Schooner
Southwest Review, Willard Spiegelman, editor emeritus
Verse, Bonnie Costello, edition editor
University Press of New England, Deborah DeNicola, volume editor

Reviews