Michael Garrigan

I wrote “Vagrant Lichen” while I was doing a solo backpacking trip through the Wind River Range in Wyoming. Even though it weighed pounds and I knew I’d be carrying it on my back for over 50 miles and over quite a few mountain passes, I brought along Rocky Mountain Natural History which is a wonderful field guide by Daniel Mathews. I’d read it every evening at camp, and one afternoon while I was sitting in my tent waiting out a hail storm, I came across his entry about vagrant lichen which clicked immediately. It felt like I was emulating their life cycle as I was wandering around this beautiful wilderness completely alone, letting the trail unfold in front of me step by step. I see that poem as a field guide on how I wish to live each of my days, if possible, totally in tune and reciprocity with the ecosystem I find myself in. 

“Ode to the Ailanthus…” is a celebratory poem, a rejoicing of the lives we find easy to reject or discard. I think it’s a turn towards Wendell Berry’s sentiment that all land is either desecrated or sacred and an effort to make the desecrated into the sacred. Yes, invasive species are harmful and can wreak havoc on ecosystems. Yes, we should do what we can to eliminate or halt their spread; however, I think sometimes in doing so we reject the post-industrial wildernesses that we live in, the wildness that is, thankfully, always there, ready to grow and become in even the unlikeliest places. So, this is a poem that is a movement towards acknowledging our own destructive actions while embracing the wild ecotones that surround us.