American Chestnut

Sometimes I conjure the morphology of a pillbug and ask the soil to hold me for a while. It’s been cold. I haven’t been with the dirt as much. Winter has never been easy for me—I don’t think I could do without it, but it costs something every year. Now there’s the city too: New York, the subway lines, the blueprint of neighborhoods I’m still memorizing like a second nervous system. I will never fully settle here, and I mean that as neither complaint nor consolation. It’s simply true the way tides are true—a fact of the place I’m in.

The mind goes where it goes. Mine goes down. Into the zone beneath our feet where pillbugs fold into themselves and the soil flora and fauna does its work of holding everything up. Down there the noise stops. The humanness stops; even, sometimes, my own. I’ve been thinking about that darkness a lot lately. What lies beneath the Land I walk. Below the large tunnels we deploy mechanical worms. I surface back into the city grateful for the breath I’m drawing, aware that the tension between these two worlds is not a problem to solve. It is where I am alive right now. It’s where this poem comes from.

Thank you for supporting my writing—an honest extension of myself. And this poem? It’s written in support of the American Chestnut. And to you, for staying with what is difficult and alive.

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We have been giving ourselves to 
people who don’t compost.
Resource is to rise again. To spring up
anew. But we’ve made it mean speed.
How much can you give. How fast
can you give it.

The chestnut came back low—shrub-height,
early succession,
no longer canopy. Still trying.
Today I saw a woman crying, sitting
as upright as a trunk, 
in front of Wifredo Lam’s painting. Tonight
I cried in front of a tree in the city.
Under a streetlamp and caught myself before asking 
if it was also waiting.
Wondering.

Darkness keeps getting misrepresented.
In this earthworm-chiseled world
there is only