Where the power lines go through,
the red clay gullies and pits, not even
privet can grow fast enough to bind it.
We clamber down and up,
and turn to enter the woods. Farther along,
we come to broken glass, old brown bottles
nearly buried, a toilet choked with brush,
bricks, some pipes, some turquoise plastic coiling.
It’s just like that, here—people dump things
and they sink, protrude rusty and jagged
from the mud, or block the trail,
stained with leaf mold. To the side,
some withered Southern red oaks,
a blackjack oak, knobby trunks of trees
choked by spiraling vines—Virginia creeper,
poison ivy—and leafless sweetgums
with their sci-fi seedpods.
Everywhere rotting, everywhere teeming,
moss like emeralds on the stumps
and hollow logs. This is my home, this leaf duff
and dereliction, where a vulture wheels
above the cedars, searching for what stinks.
Where a first tender violet, blooming
by my feet before Valentine’s Day,
signifies the seasons are in heat.
The great blue heron’s not here today,
standing motionless among the reeds.
But a turtle slides off a distant log, and sunlight
scatters like shot across the scum-slicked pond.
This poem first appeared in Paradise Is Jagged (Terrapin Books, 2023).
—
Ann Fisher-Wirth’s seventh book of poetry is Paradise Is Jagged. With Laura-Gray Street she coedited Attached to the Living World: A New Ecopoetry Anthology (forthcoming 2025). A senior fellow of the Black Earth Institute, she’s had Fulbrights to Switzerland and Sweden, and residencies at Djerassi, Hedgebrook, Storyknife, and elsewhere. She received the 2023 Governor’s Award for Excellence in Poetry from the Mississippi Arts Commission. Her current book project is Into the Chalice of Your Thoughts.
