The Rag-Picker's Guide to Poetry: Poems, Poets, Process

Spill

14 David Baker Spill The SPRINg ePheMeRAlS Here she comes with her face to be kissed. Here she comes lugging two plastic sacks looped over her arms and stuffed with fresh shoots. It’s barely dawn. She’s been out for an hour already, digging up what she can save before developers raze the day’s lot sites and set woodpiles ablaze. That’s their plan for the ninety-plus acres. She squats in the sun to show me wild phlox in pink-running-to-blue, rue anemone, masses of colt’s foot, wild ginger, blood root and mayapples , bracken and fiddlehead fern—ferns being not spring ephemerals per se, but imperiled by road graders come to shave the shaded slopes where they grow. Once I held her in a snow cover of sheets. Wind beat the world while we listened. Her back was a sail, unfurling. She wanted me to touch stitches there, little scabs, where doctors had sliced the sick cells Spill 15 and cauterized her skin for safety’s sake. Now her hands are spotted by briars, bubbles of blood daubed in brown. She’s got burrs in her red hair. Both sleeves are torn. She kneels as the sunlight cuts through pine needles above us, casting a grid like the plats the surveyors use. It’s the irony of every cell: that it divides to multiply. This way the greedy have bought up the land behind ours to parcel for resale at twentyfold what they paid weeks ago. It’s a race to outrun their gas cans and matches, to line the path to our creek with transplants of spice bush, yellow fawn lily, to set aside space in the garden for the frail. She adjusts the map she’s drawn of the tumbling woods—where each flower and fern come from, under what tree, beside which ridge. Dysfunctional junctional nevus: a name like a bad joke for the growth on her skin, pigment too pale for much sunlight. Drooping trillium, she says, handing me a cluster of roots, unfolding leaves— rare around here. How delicate, a trillium, whose oils are food for ants, whose sessile leaves are palm-sized, tripartite. They spread a shadow over each stem’s fragile one bloom, white in most cases, though this one’s maroon. This makes it rarer. It hangs like a red bell safe from the sun. It bends 16 The RAg-PIckeR’S guIde To PoeTRy like our necks bend, not in grief, not prayer, as we work with our backs to the trees, as they burn. huNgRy This time the jay, fat as a boot, bluer than sky gone blue now that the rain has finished with us for a while, this loud jay at the neck of the black walnut keeps cawing I want, I want—but can’t finish his clause. Hard runoff has spread the driveway with seeds, green talcum, the sex of things, packed like plaster against shutters and tool boxes, sides of the barn, while the force of water pouring down from the stopped-up gullet of gutter has drilled holes deep in the mud. Yet the world of the neighborhood is still just the world. So much, so much. Like the bulldog next door, choking itself on a chain to guard the yard of the one who starves it. Too MANy my neighbors say, when what they mean are deer—the foragers, the few at a time, fair if little more than rats, according to a farmer friend nearby, whose corn means plenty. They nip the peaches, and one bite ruins; hazard every road with their runninginto -headlights- Spill 17 not-away; a menace; plague; something should be done. Or here in town, where I’ve found a kind of afterlife—the townies hate the damage to their variegated hostas, shadeside ferns—what they do inside white bunkers of the county’s one good course is“criminal,” deep scuffs through the sand—that’s one thing—but lush piles of polishedolive -droppings, hoofruts in the chemically- and color-enriched greens . . . Yet here’s one more, curled like a tan seashell not a foot from my blade, justcome -to-theworld fawn, speckled, wet as a trout, which I didn’t see, hacking back brush beneath my tulip poplar—it’s not afraid, mews like a kitten, can’t walk—there are so many, too many of us, the world...