Abundance, April 202
A dark day but we’re not unique
walking the Intervale, a riverside strip
of earnest new agriculture, bordered by wild,
untidy windrows and mud-packed trails.
Someone young, at least compared to me,
and generously strong, not long ago surely
heaved the heavy branches aside.
It’s too early for foliage and death
is everywhere in extravagance. Stalks
and branches lie fallen beside the banks—
willow and wild grape, ostrich ferns stiffened
to the cold and sinews of Virginia creeper—
heaps of the dead, tangled, piled together,
spent seed heads emptied of intention,
whole limbs broken off, their inner workings
splintered and pale. I keep thinking
what it means to be useful, to live and to die,
to be different from a vine or a tree but
not altogether removed, in the end, to share
not only particular molecules but the basic flow
of what we need spreading through veins, and after
a very long time, at least compared to an hour’s walk
along the fields, to return to something crumbly
and rich, though it takes a certain bleakness
I can’t shake to see this emptying reshaped
to something it doesn’t seem right to call useful.
What is left, my love, long after? Who will explain
our trembling bodies once we are all un-made?
Judith Chalmer is the author of two books of poetry, most recently, Minnow (Kelsay Books, 2020), as well as co-translator of two books of haiku and tanka. Read more.