WEBVTT

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I'll read a shorter
lyric and then

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three slightly longer
meditative walk journeys.

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And the only thing I really
want to say to set this up

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is that I wrote Companion
Grasses, actually,

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a large part of it, while I
was already really quite ill.

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And then I was interrupted
in my work by Agnes

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and actually writing a book
directly about chronic illness.

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But when I came back to my
writing about the environment,

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about eco poetics, I found it
fascinating that naturalists'

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bodies are always healthy,
that in the literature, all

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the naturalists, they're
all over the place,

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they never get sick,
they never get diarrhea,

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they never crap
themselves or throw up.

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They're always marching up
a hill, diving into a marsh.

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They don't complain.

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You know, I was just like
who are these super heroes?

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And you know, if you read
Rachel Carson's biography,

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you know she dies
of breast cancer,

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and she's bravely
finishing Silent Spring.

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Of course, it's a book in
which there's no room for that.

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But you know, she goes
and testifies in her wig

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and is this symbol of strength.

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Thoreau's dying of tuberculosis
and he goes to the frontier

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and tromps around in
Michigan and Wisconsin.

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And there's no record of
that even in his notebooks.

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So I was really
interested, even,

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in the way in which the
naturalists, the pressure

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on the naturalists, is
to actually be healthy

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because so much of
our national ideology

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around the natural world has
to do with will you go there

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for health, of course, because
it's inherently healthy.

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And we can't actually
argue that anymore.

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And so one of the
things that I was really

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trying to balance
in these poems was

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a sense of trying to deal with
my own sense of embodiment,

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which can be fragile,
without analogizing

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that in any way to
the natural world--

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they're not the same
crisis at all, obviously--

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but still to also try to
speak about these issues

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of the naturalist's body,
of it not being transparent,

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and again, totally
a transparent I.

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What does it mean when the
physical lived body gets there?

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So I had a long pause after
that book where I could not

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write, partially because
I was really ill,

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and then also I didn't know
how to return to these poems.

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So I'm going to begin with
a poem that enabled me

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to write the rest of the poems.

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I'm not sure if I'm going
to keep it in the book.

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But it's called "After
a Long Illness".

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The first three poems are set
in Johnson, Vermont, which is

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where Vermont Studio Center is.

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And I taught there
one year and then

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I came back as a Thoreau Fellow
in Environmental Writing.

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So I got to spend quite a
lot of time hiking there.

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And so that's kind
of all I'll say.

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And so if you have questions
at the end, feel free to ask.

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"After a Long Illness".

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At night, the river
frozen over fits its bed

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like a key, its lock.

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The current keeps turning
but the surface won't open.

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I can hear ice click, shift,
its crystalline pins caught.

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20 odd miles downstream
from Lake Eden, its origin,

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the Gihon's near its end.

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After the old Red Mill,
before it enters the Lamoille,

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it falls flat, a closed door.

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Wrong key in the wrong lock.

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I like to put my mind where
two worlds meet and agree

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to disagree.

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The teachers say
take up the water,

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make it your body and
mind, make it thought.

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But I think I must think
the way elements make

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temporary arrangements with
weather, oxygen and hydrogen

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lock their electrons and expand
a lattice of tetrahedrons.

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All their new shapes make
ephemeral color the way

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what light there is at midnight
heightens ice brighter,

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briefly, than snow.

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And toward that
whiteness my mind

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pushes outward from the interior
where olivine water washes

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over gravel and sand.

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Thought exerts drag
against the icy underside

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and I feel a border
experience, can't cross over

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into knowledge the way, in
front of paradox, my mind stops.

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For five years my body
killed me and kept me alive.

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Bear berry brambles
on the bank catch snow

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weighted with rain that
falls straight down,

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hissing as it hits the ice.

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Who am I now?

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Above, mountains.

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Below, the river, both moving
and still inaccessible,

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and everywhere being
is and keeps to itself,

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hidden in emblems of the
outward seeds extracted

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from bracts of a dry pine cone.

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The spring equinox is near.

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Rain coaxes the icy
lattices to relax into laps,

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little cracks mid river.

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It's so quiet.

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I hardly feel desire.

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But its soft force flenses
the strongest water from thaw,

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there, at the thinnest
brink, kinesis

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that resists stillness,
thinking on thinking,

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the current pulses.

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