A Plea for my Reincarnation
1. No finely-shaped thought
September. The apple trees have long since
dropped their leaves and fruit
spills everywhere on the mountain—
wasps are drunk with it, bear
and beetles gorge, are sticky and sated.
This costs nothing.
2. The heart eats the heart
The wild cherry was a hundred feet tall
damaged, leaning—
toward the three-trunked ash she'd grown next to
for a hundred years. The spring we took down
the cherry
the ash dropped every leaf and knelt
to die, griefbroken—
this costs everything.
3. I am undone
Who among us is holy?
Who listens? The hunger to count,
to acquire, to withhold and store—
It will cost everything.
4. How little the young know
One year, then one summer—
tentative shoots rising whitely, bluely
from the ash. I begin to see the surrounding
forest writing silently down
the abandoned longing of the ash
in green whips, in thin green gifts.
This costs something.
5. Today, beneath the witch hazel
Hamamelis, a word for service.
And wiche, or pliant: bendable, not magic.
She bends in service to water, homefolk
said, and showed me. Call it also winter-bloom,
flowers spilled everywhere on the snow—
the heart grows drunk with it.
6. How can I dream except
for the next life and next?
To descend or rise in company of wasp
and beetle and bear amid
such giants.
Beating Outside My Chest
I went to sleep beneath a trillium leaf.
Sometimes my mouth goes on its own journey
and my mouth is on this unticketed trip
with me, stowaway, crushed such that my
blessing misses its landing, chips a tooth.
A nest of egg and foam blows over in wind.
Nothing is safe in this winnowing—
eggs and boys and mothers are fraught,
spit-glued with marbles under a trillium leaf.
I'm not sleeping, crouched by an open window
trying to smoke down the past, blowing it
out the window at 3 am like a teen.
A nightship filled with broken blows and
blessings sleeps beneath a trillium leaf.
Watched by crows and friend to salamanders, Lisa Creech Bledsoe is a hiker, beekeeper, and writer living in the mountains of Western North Carolina. She is the author of two full-length books of poetry, Appalachian Ground (2019), and Wolf Laundry (2020). She has poems out in Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Chiron Review, Third Wednesday, Otoliths, ANMLY, and Quartet, among others.
My website: https://AppalachianGround.com