Over The Hills and Everywhere: Black Poets and the Natural World

20 Camille Dungy & Sebastian Matthews When I found I had crossed that line, I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person. There was such a glory over everything. —Harriet Tubman Ecotone: liminal space, agitated place where this way and that break their fists into open hands then thread together in a knot of fingers: that zone we move in, neither here nor there, not fully this mode but not entirely that groove either: time of functioning ambivalence: corridor both a blossoming mystery and a landing-strip cleared for take off and landing: alleyway of the natural world; trickster landscape; crossroads; bivouac: overlapping areas, unstable places: a state of mind. Ecotone: the rich strip along borders: tide pools, prairie to pasture, voyeur to ventriloquist, sidewalk to yard: what is found along such boundaries: what’s discovered when there is drought and also deluge, scorch as well as succor, wind buff and calm; what erupts from tideturned , till-turned, mole-turned, grave-tossed soil, what, there, plants itself and thrives. These poems progress: contemplate, first, the nature of the world, keep an objective distance; let what is seen startle; grow more and more involved; this could be you, this could be your body; watch what you eat, remember what food stands for, where it comes from, how it heals; let rustling leaves remind you, disaster’s come this way before; you were not the first to come along this path; there has been damage, there has been strife; water, playful one moment, is not always kind; there has been destruction, there has been betrayal, all faith has been lost; remember how we got here; note where you might go, look around, see the field; devastating, difficult, beautiful. Over The Hills and Everywhere: Black Poets and the Natural World 21 Dungy & Matthews Listen to the voices speaking and singing here, notice the shifts and turns. “This morning I’d seen a woman /” as Rachel Eliza Griffiths’s speaker observes: “twisted like paper / at the bottom of a long bridge,” then deftly weaves the thought into a friendly phone conversation. . . . Anthony Walton contemplates Rachel Carson in the Rachel Carson Wildlife Refuge: “Ground water misting into rain, falling // back into ground water; salt water wash / through brackish fresh water bordering // sea. . . .” Ross Gay talks to his imagined child: “And as to your mother—well, I don’t know— / but my guess is that lilac bursts from her throat.” Frank X Walker engages in a homespun activism in “Homeopathic”: “Enjoying our own fruit, we let the juice run down our chins, / leaving a trail of tiny seeds to harvest on hungry days like these.” The voice in Major Jackson’s “Migration” reflects, on edge: “I shivered by a flagpole, knowing betrayal / Was coming my way.” Here is Cynthia Parker-Ohene, light flashing over stony ground and coming upon “a caste even unto death / as though bone may copulate / with bone.” In “her table mountain,” we witness Evie Shockley’s heroine gain a precarious vantage from which to observe her world, peering down at the city life and announcing “—it still bore the grassy scar where district six / had thrummed—and she loved it, despite the miserable august weather, // despite the history of peoples chained and chaining, killed and killing.” Ten poets: Thirteen poems: the visual artwork of two: all black: all American: Maine, California, Kentucky, North Carolina, New Jersey, New York: all but two born since 1965. Ecotone: bursting margins, the creative complexity here. Here. ...