Poetry Series: Today; (my) Exploit; Your Blue-Move
By Sydney Read
Artist Statement
My poetry explores language that turns our attention back into connection with the natural world. In what ways does the natural world “make-with” me, as a co-composer of poetry? Can poetry be a bridge, a point of reconnection and reorientation, toward the presence of what we live among—the more than human? I consider my compositions to be made-with the natural world around me; the poems I offer here are born out of my composing-with the parts of Maine I know best.
I want my poetry to be a means through which you and I—poet and reader—might visit to re-attain a sense of interconnectedness with the wild world around us. My poetry seeks to radically intertwine the human with the world we call home, or alternatively, point out when we actively are separating ourselves using language. When might a poem, a little collection of words, give rise to the impulse to remember where our feet are? That the world we live in, we not only inhabit but share-with?
We live in a time in which it is imperative that we remind ourselves that we are not alone: we are living and dying-with, in community with the little and large beings that dwell alongside us. To care for our world, which is rapidly dying world (and by our own hands no less!), we must de-center ourselves consciously. We must become-with our fellow birds and hedgehogs, keeping them in mind with our steps and our breaths, knowing that they talk to us, and we talk to them.
I offer these poems as a step toward care-full action. My hope is that these poems will unsettle the ways in which we live our lives in separation, cause us to become conscious of our relationship to the more-than-human world (that is, a world that includes nonhuman beings), and therefore exercise care for it.
To save our world, or at the very least, help her along, we require a conscious shift in perspective. It starts, I believe, with language. I hope that my poems help you notice where your feet are. I hope that when you walk outside today, you recognize the smells and songs of the beings with which you always share your life. May we all walk gently along our earth in thanks, remember those with whom we walk.
Today
Remember your hands, gentle burrower.
Return them to the earth—
yes, that there, the dirt!
The patch below your window will do.
You, creature! You, friend to worms!
Feel under your fingernails for the invitation and
recall that you, too,
are webbed and clawed and
wanting to be
with
the rest,
left behind, be
low
before—remember?
You do.
You breathe(d).
So, settle down and show me:
your tentacle fingers,
oh
my sweet animal.
Show me how you
yearn
for home.
(my) Exploit
give me
of your quills,
oh hedgehog
their sur
prize
like these bananas, their ripe-raw
dan
gle off the holder—hold it!
they quicken, with the snow-sun, see it—just there
behind them, softly yellowing along with them
beyond my kitchen window?
and there below the snow-stung tree the squirrel
our quill-less cousin who waits
just as well as
the anticipating orange, unpe
eled, who
holds her breath
which is my breath superimposed onto her breath like a
metaphor or a plea
but really just
imagine!
if an orange
could breathe like the
squirrel can breathe like
you can breathe and
then who
is breathing, now?
give me
these words these breaths these prayers that engender the boundaries of our realities that tell the textures of our quills and our breaths and our banana orange peels and oh don’t we always find out that we are all the same in the end but still I choose to float above my body, wanting more!
if you give me
of your quills
oh hedgehog,
will I be sorry?
will we be whole?
see her turn
saying
soft
“when I pull these quills out of my skin,
(you call it poetry!)
will you thank me when I’m done?”
Your Blue-Move
Wait!
Before you go, if you could just
tell me:
What is this
that is different
in you?
See, you’re hazy you’re
melting, just there, at the edges
into the sky behind, you see
that blue-move and you’re
moving-with her, like a cloud.
Or maybe it’s your hands, you see them? Open:
your palms, your love-lines tracing a living,
untraceable place.
See your thumbs? Perched?
You’re holding your openness like an offering.
Don’t forget—
I saw you slip under the covers last night. I know it’s true, you smell like
lilies and frog mud but you’re also so
home. You pressed your feet into the backs of my toes, and
your breath on
my neck was
misty, like morning air
snakelike, like weaving through blades of grass.
I heard you murmur their names in your dreams.
And your trousers, unrolled! Your eyes, unbidden.
I see them now, in the doe-brown dirt. I see
you there.
So forgive me, please, but where just where have you gone?
You are here, darling.
You are more here than you’ve ever been.
Isn’t it marvelous?