I'll read a shorter lyric and then
three slightly longer meditative walk journeys.
And the only thing I really want to say to set this up
is that I wrote Companion Grasses, actually,
a large part of it, while I was already really quite ill.
And then I was interrupted in my work by Agnes
and actually writing a book directly about chronic illness.
But when I came back to my writing about the environment,
about eco poetics, I found it fascinating that naturalists'
bodies are always healthy, that in the literature, all
the naturalists, they're all over the place,
they never get sick, they never get diarrhea,
they never crap themselves or throw up.
They're always marching up a hill, diving into a marsh.
They don't complain.
You know, I was just like who are these super heroes?
And you know, if you read Rachel Carson's biography,
you know she dies of breast cancer,
and she's bravely finishing Silent Spring.
Of course, it's a book in which there's no room for that.
But you know, she goes and testifies in her wig
and is this symbol of strength.
Thoreau's dying of tuberculosis and he goes to the frontier
and tromps around in Michigan and Wisconsin.
And there's no record of that even in his notebooks.
So I was really interested, even,
in the way in which the naturalists, the pressure
on the naturalists, is to actually be healthy
because so much of our national ideology
around the natural world has to do with will you go there
for health, of course, because it's inherently healthy.
And we can't actually argue that anymore.
And so one of the things that I was really
trying to balance in these poems was
a sense of trying to deal with my own sense of embodiment,
which can be fragile, without analogizing
that in any way to the natural world--
they're not the same crisis at all, obviously--
but still to also try to speak about these issues
of the naturalist's body, of it not being transparent,
and again, totally a transparent I.
What does it mean when the physical lived body gets there?
So I had a long pause after that book where I could not
write, partially because I was really ill,
and then also I didn't know how to return to these poems.
So I'm going to begin with a poem that enabled me
to write the rest of the poems.
I'm not sure if I'm going to keep it in the book.
But it's called "After a Long Illness".
The first three poems are set in Johnson, Vermont, which is
where Vermont Studio Center is.
And I taught there one year and then
I came back as a Thoreau Fellow in Environmental Writing.
So I got to spend quite a lot of time hiking there.
And so that's kind of all I'll say.
And so if you have questions at the end, feel free to ask.
"After a Long Illness".
At night, the river frozen over fits its bed
like a key, its lock.
The current keeps turning but the surface won't open.
I can hear ice click, shift, its crystalline pins caught.
20 odd miles downstream from Lake Eden, its origin,
the Gihon's near its end.
After the old Red Mill, before it enters the Lamoille,
it falls flat, a closed door.
Wrong key in the wrong lock.
I like to put my mind where two worlds meet and agree
to disagree.
The teachers say take up the water,
make it your body and mind, make it thought.
But I think I must think the way elements make
temporary arrangements with weather, oxygen and hydrogen
lock their electrons and expand a lattice of tetrahedrons.
All their new shapes make ephemeral color the way
what light there is at midnight heightens ice brighter,
briefly, than snow.
And toward that whiteness my mind
pushes outward from the interior where olivine water washes
over gravel and sand.
Thought exerts drag against the icy underside
and I feel a border experience, can't cross over
into knowledge the way, in front of paradox, my mind stops.
For five years my body killed me and kept me alive.
Bear berry brambles on the bank catch snow
weighted with rain that falls straight down,
hissing as it hits the ice.
Who am I now?
Above, mountains.
Below, the river, both moving and still inaccessible,
and everywhere being is and keeps to itself,
hidden in emblems of the outward seeds extracted
from bracts of a dry pine cone.
The spring equinox is near.
Rain coaxes the icy lattices to relax into laps,
little cracks mid river.
It's so quiet.
I hardly feel desire.
But its soft force flenses the strongest water from thaw,
there, at the thinnest brink, kinesis
that resists stillness, thinking on thinking,
the current pulses.