Timothy Liu

So much of American poetry sounds bourgeois to my ears. “I own this house!” or “I own that parcel of land!” While I admire the human capacity for gratitude and wonder and stewardship, I also find myself repulsed by the unacknowledged privilege of (mostly white) money, that sense of entitlement. The mountain I forage on is public land, but even before the Department of Environmental Protection got ahold of it to protect tributaries that feed into the Ashokan Reservoir (water supply for NYC), the land was unceded by the Lenape centuries ago. Full disclosure: I too am a homeowner on half an acre, bought a cottage built in 1937 (on a compound the Marx Brothers rehearsed in during their summers off from Hollywood). We made the purchase back in 2007 just a year before the 2008 crash. Only during the pandemic did its market value shoot up after lying dormant for over a dozen years, a home we couldn’t now afford on an academic’s salary. No matter. At the heart of my poem “Traveling Light” is what a shaman from the Queros tribe in Cusco, Peru, once taught me: at the outset of any hike up a mountain, ask its Protector (the Apu) for permission and protection. At the heart of this poem and the second one published in Plant-Human Quarterly, “Bromance,” is the suggestion of reciprocity. A pear tree. Husbandry. A friendship with a married man. A patch of chanterelles and the creatures whom I share the mountain with. Poems too can embody our attentive thanks to cherished moments, give something back in language with an acknowledgment that we take nothing with us after we are gone.