“Geese as a layer of the healthy, glowing skin of the world.”
Barbara Kingsolver, Introduction to A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold
Out beyond the sheared, green edge of tame,
the first layer of mystery, the wild, beckons.
Beneath the hustling insect gossip, below
the feathered flight of winged things, earth
harbors more beauty than the naves of medieval
cathedrals, more grace than the arc of a goose’s
drift across the snow-globe sky. Dip your hand
a forearm deep into the dirt, celebrate abundant
life, before you mourn its demise, soiled by greed,
by gold-struck men panning for metal with mercury
hands, by machines that claw and rip, by hubris
that paves the living world, that stops its breath.
In the teeming microbial life of forest floor, secrets.
The second layer of mystery waits, more clues
hidden within the hairy tufts of fern and flower.
and above, in the canopy, nests and niches,
while the rocks sit, stoic, in streambeds, their role
as witness set, long ago, in stone.
It is the nature of sedimentary things
to record life in fossilized detail, to stow
in the subcutaneous layers the story
of our lives upon this crust of planet.
Naked, I lie down in the tall grass, willing,
eager, to graft myself to the skin of the world.
This poem first appeared in Anthology Songs for Wild Ohio (Last Exit Press, 2023).
—
Janet E. Irvin is an educator, poet, and the author of seven mystery/thriller novels under the name J.E. Irvin. Her poems have appeared in Hawaii Pacific Review, Creosote, The Raven’s Perch, and Sky Island Journal. A member of the Greenville Poets, Sisters in Crime, and Buckeye Crime Writers, Irvin resides in southwest Ohio on the edge of a nature park which serves as inspiration for her work.
