From You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World, edited by Ada Limón (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2024) | Copyright © 2024 by Milkweed Editions and the Library of Congress | Reprinted with permission from Milkweed Editions.
Published in association with the Library of Congress and edited by the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States, Ada Limón, You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World (Milkweed Editions, 2024) is a singular collection of fifty poems reflecting on our relationship to the natural world by some of our most celebrated contemporary writers, each poem engaging with its author’s local landscape and offering an intimate model of how we relate to the world around us.
The Rumpus, in partnership with Milkweed Editions, is pleased to preview this anthology with poems from Paul Tran, Cecily Parks, and Erika Meitner.
Terroir
Paul Tran
Below the willows while they wept, the sun swept its faceless face
down the edge of the river. Ducklings tailed the twilight
light, vanishing quickly, toward the horizon
where, it seemed, even truth and beauty vanished. Below the darkness
darkening, quickly still, the bees mistook for forsythia and tulips
the lips of paper cups trembling, nearly toppling in the evening
wind, half-filled with wine from the cliffs of a country faraway
where the monks, having day after day tasted the soil and the rain, insisted
the grapes contained, in each form, the memory of the land and the hands
that remade them. The monks, without doubt, thought
we took this memory into our form, each body and mind
willfully, though rarely willingly, revised and, night after night, devised
from an idea, the seed of it. We, to that end, could taste and experience everything
everything had been and been through. Did you? I’ve begun to believe
the present, like the shadows on the water, twisting, doesn’t have to be a form
the past took. The past has taken so much. Must there be more
to give, to give back, to get on, or away, from this? My memory moored me.
Lifting, now, my cup to yours, my eyes to yours in the light
cast by the dark, I don’t know if I can be known like that.
Fresh snow. Clouds of smoke. Flight without wings. Tower. Kings
demanding another story. Another dawn, sleepless, donning another
little death. Hooves of death I couldn’t stop for
running through me until I was run through, laid like a featherblade,
raw and bloodied. Blade made sharp by a throat. From that eternity
I found my way here less because and more in spite of, to spite
the land and the hands I’d been dealt. Soil and rain
and wind, blazing and billowing, like the cloak a saint wore
to put out a candle in a cathedral that will burn: my spirit persisted
despite resistance. How could I let the past be fused, perpetually, inside me?
Perhaps it’s true, and I’m too selfish, wanting all the credit, to savor
the beauty of not having saved myself entirely by myself. Will you
look at that? Our cups are empty. Here. Let me. Let’s see.
Hackberry
Cecily Parks
A place I love is about to disappear.
When the summer sunset drives
into the west side
of our house, burning
with a heat we’ve been warned about,
I look out the two square windows
that are filled with hackberry leaves whose greens
vary according to light and wind
and whose shade composes a sort-of room
for us, under the tree.
It’s said that those who sleep under a hackberry
will be protected from evil spirits,
and I can’t stop thinking of how the four of us for years
blithely slept the sleep of the protected, as if
there were no other sleep, and how
in the daytime, the tree arranged its shade
to let hearts of sunlight fall
on the stone path underneath it. How a scar
on the tree’s bark looked like a brown moth
pressed unendingly against it.
For months all I’ve wanted is the blessing
of an open window. Maybe also
I’ve wanted to sleep through the night.
Tonight is the last night we’ll sleep
under the hackberry whose leaves
at sunset cause the walls
and floor to shimmer—
it reminds me of crying.
You can see the tree from the whole house, June says.
When I was younger and walked barefoot on the sharp stones,
Calla says, I stepped on its roots because they were
smooth.
Kretzschmaria deusta, a beautifully named fungus
ate the roots from the inside
and now what held my daughter’s weight
are columns of nothing. Now
the tips of the live oaks softly brush
the tips of the hackberry canopy.
I would like to believe in tenderness.
Earlier today, I tried my arms
around the tree
but they wouldn’t wrap all the way
around and, actually, the tree scratched
my skin, and tomorrow
a crew will cut it down.
Some people call a hackberry
a junk tree or trash tree,
throwing shade. I love the tree’s shade, and now
it will be gone,
as well as the sunlight in the shape
of love, and the evil spirits
will do as they please with our nights.
How do I write this poem, I ask my family
as we sit together in the disappearing room.
Manifesto of Fragility / Terraform
Erika Meitner
In the Grand Tetons on the shores of Jenny Lake
a ranger is giving a talk: You can gently feel and
bond with the lichen; she is stroking the side
of a tree trunk. The little things in our ecosystem,
she says. And these days our ecosystem is basically
a Yiddish resistance song: “Mir Veln Zey Iberlebn”—
we will outlive them, since there are critically
endangered orcas harassing ships, biting at rudders,
and even sinking yachts off the Iberian coast.
Scientists shun the word ‘attack’ for these encounters,
claim it’s not aggression but most likely the killer whales
playing, finding pleasure, like the female sea otter
in Santa Cruz accosting surfers, committing longboard
larceny. The otter was shredding, caught a couple of
nice waves, said a sixteen-year-old dude whose board
was commandeered by the otter at Cowell’s Beach.
Multiple attempts have been made to capture her,
none successful. And in the Netherlands, magpies
and crows are turning hostile architecture into homes,
constructing cyberpunk nests from anti-bird spikes—
strips of sharp metal pins meant to keep them from
perching on buildings. I’m definitely rooting for the birds
—they’re fighting back a bit, said the Dutch biologist
studying the phenomenon. Never mind the record
wildfire season in Canada that made the weather
forecast on my phone—no matter what state I was in—
just “smoke,” the unprecedented heat domes across
the US all summer, the ocean in Miami at 100 degrees
sparking coral reef bleaching and a massive die-off.
Before we went out West, every night I walked a path
around Tiedeman’s Pond getting dive-bombed by redwinged
blackbirds, which is so common during nesting
season the local paper offers advice: make eye contact,
run for cover, wear a hat or a bike helmet when you
go out on foot. The ranger is still talking about lichen:
they colonize harsh environments, infiltrate and
wedge apart pieces of rock, serve as food in times
of stress for mammals, including humans; birds use
lichen for nest-building. Lichen are possibly the oldest
living things on earth. We will outlive them. Mir veln
zey iberlebn—the Jews who made up that resistance
song on the spot were Polish, murdered by the SS
in Lublin in 1939, ordered to sing to their own execution.
They all died against barbed wire but their song lived on.
And in the prairie restoration area, despite the drought,
despite the shrinking footprint of the pond, the ground
is still bursting with a riot of purple and yellow and white:
cup plants, plume thistles, beebalms and bergamots.
Resistance is struggle against impossible circumstance,
refusal, the will to survive in the face of annihilation;
it can also be the surviving remnant enacting revenge.
The dictionary offers sample sentences: they have shown
a stubborn resistance to change; government forces were
unable to crush the resistance; the troops met heavy
resistance as they approached the city; he went underground
and joined the resistance. In the story about
the Jews of Lublin, no one sang until one person began.
***
About the Poets
Paul Tran is the author of the debut poetry collection All the Flowers Kneeling. Their work appears in the New York Times, the New Yorker, The Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. Winner of the Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize, as well as fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, Stanford University, and The National Endowment for the Arts, Paul is an assistant professor of English and Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Cecily Parks is the editor of the anthology The Echoing Green: Poems of Fields, Meadows, and Grasses, and the author of three poetry collections, including most recently The Seeds, which is forthcoming from Alice James Books. Her poems appear in the New Yorker, A Public Space, the New Republic, The Best American Poetry 2022, and elsewhere. She teaches in the MFA Program at Texas State University and lives in Austin, Texas.
Erika Meitner is the author of six books of poems, including Ideal Cities, a National Poetry Series winner; Holy Moly Carry Me, which won a National Jewish Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Useful Junk. Meitner’s poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, the New York Times, the New Republic, Orion, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. Her other honors include fellowships from MacDowell, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The Hermitage Artist Retreat, and Bethany Arts Community. She was the 2015 US-UK Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Creative Writing at Queen’s University Belfast, a 2022 Virginia Commission for the Arts Fellow, and is currently a 2023 Mandel Institute Cultural Leadership Fellow, as well as a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
