Forage
Page 4
But I’d been to see the art of Nellie Mae, her Pig on Expressway, the pig biting his lip yet carrying his old figure forward into the fresh collision of colors. Her sculptures of chewed gum and marbles putting tired materials back into play. The drawings of butterfly dogs, donkey haints, women hens—hybrids adapted, hopes surviving. In purple pen on wallpaper, Something That Ain’t Been Born Yet, a bushy-tailed, big-mouthed future life. And her letters in crayon command, “Can’t turn around now, must get on the right road.”
Litter flies in front of the windshield—a page printed with words. It was a book. It’s become a bird, a just-begun breed, by being wind-tossed, by being torn to feathers. A right road? The cursive curve flows, somewhere for scrappier forms still to go.
(after Nellie Mae Rowe)
ON THE MOVE
Crape myrtle’s confetti of flowers.
Magnolia polished to mirror shine.
Live oaks that never will drop
their leaves, some standing since
the Civil War. And shacks,
empty of sharecroppers fled North.
Scenery of the South. Of survival.
For which trees still try. Seedling by seedling,
tree species can seek higher ground.
Can move, migrate where it’s cooler
as the weather, one kind of climate, changes.
Many believe every how it has always been
will stay. While even rooted symbols,
to endure, edge away.
FRESH TRACKS
“Coywolf: New dog-coyote-wolf hybrid already numbers in the millions.”
Out of coyote and wolf crossed. Out of coyote’s compromises
about where to live, what to hunt. Out of wolf’s big bones,
bearing wolf’s bulk, fed by wolf’s broad jaw, wolf’s bite.
Out of dog, out of willingness to mate with dog,
out of tameness turned. Away from coyness. Out of coyness.
Into clamor, crashes of cars and construction, into noise
no longer weapon against the wild. Into crowds, into cities,
not creeping. Holding full tail high, nose proudly low
for the trails to where fat suburban rabbits go.
Into the unheralded havens of highway sides, into the unclaimed
kingdoms of park corners, into habitats we create
that cannot shelter us—the tender furless. Following graveyards’
green, beckoning glows from borough to borough. Each generation,
gorged on garbage, grows.
From earth, when we can no longer endure or
be endured. From cold forests cut and no more, from trees,
from all we’ve made fall like the trees. Following timber,
following trade routes, following trains, arriving by railroad,
as once to the West, another civilization—
Out of survival, out of desire for it, out of dogs past being pets
and the doggedness with which life persists
despite the end of one form. Out of the fresh tracks life lays.
Over the ways of we who will not scavenge
so cannot be saved. Street-crossing, side-walking,
coywolves, not coy, they come.
(after Philip Levine)
WITH THE GEORGICS’ LAST WORD
The graveyard gives the town its only green.
The graveyard, and the vacant lots.
Instead of dreaming houses to be built
on them, the possibility I could see
is of woods filling in again, returning.
And maybe I should have felt guilt once,
when I made love on the grass of a graveyard.
Though I was happy, lying there,
with our bodies, our living, and looking
up at the leaves.
Leaves have been what I wanted most,
on long walks in heat, when I kept moving forward
by thinking only, purely, of the next few trees,
a future that I’d fade into, fanned out as
shade.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author wishes to thank the following:
The publications in which many of these poems (often with different titles and in different forms) have appeared: 32 Poems, About Place Journal, the Academy of American Poets website and Poem-a-Day, Asheville Poetry Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Catamaran Literary Reader, Construction, Ecotone, Fogged Clarity, Green Mountains Review, the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art exhibit Call and Response, The Kenyon Review, the Oxford American, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, storySouth, The Swamp, Terrain.org, This Land, Tuesday: An Art Project, and Verse Daily.
The sources from which I have gathered ideas, ranging from the Radiolab podcast episode “Super Cool” about Curzio Malaparte’s book Kaputt, from which I have borrowed some of Walter Murch’s language, to many literary texts such as David Ferry’s translation of The Georgics, and from a number of writers whose commentaries on the Oxford Junior Dictionary preceded mine to the vocabulary and biology my parents taught me early, along with the ability to glean.
All the people and programs who have supported the writing of this book, including the Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts and Sciences, the MacDowell Colony, the Bread Loaf and Sewanee writers’ conferences, the Frost Place, Auburn University’s Department of English, Penguin Books and Paul in particular, Hannah (for fun and style, smarts and substance, and keeping me going in many senses), Anna, Maria, Derek, Austin, Ross, Deb, Gary, Lisa, Miriam, Laura-Gray, Laura, my parents (who deserve thanking again and again), and the one who has to live with the poems and poet every misstep of the way, my closest adviser and friend: Justin.
NICOLE MCCONVILLE PHOTOGRAPHY
Rose McLarney’s collections of poems are Its Day Being Gone, winner of the National Poetry Series, and Forage, both from Penguin Books, as well as The Always Broken Plates of Mountains, published by Four Way Books. She is coeditor of A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia from University of Georgia Press. Rose has been awarded fellowships by the MacDowell Colony and the Bread Loaf and Sewanee writers’ conferences; served as Dartmouth Poet in Residence at the Frost Place; and has received other prizes such as the Chaffin Award for Achievement in Appalachian Writing and the Fellowship of Southern Writers’ George Garrett New Writing Award for Poetry. Her work has appeared in publications including The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, The Missouri Review, the Oxford American, and many other journals. Rose earned her MFA from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and has taught at the college, among other institutions. Currently, she is associate professor of creative writing at Auburn University and coeditor in chief and poetry editor of the Southern Humanities Review.
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