"Y" is for "You Are Here"

‘The lines of a poem are speaking to each other, not you to them or they to you.’ (Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack and Honey)

As I begin this post, I’ve just returned from a dream of a two-week residency at Sitka Center for Art and Ecology on the central Oregon coast, there for the purpose assembling a new collection of poems (significant progess was made, I am happy to say).

Arriving at my supremely comfortable cabin on day one, I found it supplied with everything from soup to nuts…and I mean that literally: the thoughtful collection of goodies in the “welcome” basket on my table even included a can of soup and a package of nuts. 

Also included was a gift-wrapped package, which I opened to find a complimentary copy of the anthology, You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World, edited by poet (and current U.S. Poet Laureate) Ada Limón. 

Needing rest after a long and rainy drive, I collapsed onto my cabin’s cushion-y window seat with the book and a cup of tea. Turning to the first poem (You Belong to the World, by Carrie Fountain), I felt so instantly and deeply met by it, that while I’m almost sure I didn’t proceed to read all fifty poems in one sitting, I think I actually might have!  

And as I try to identify now just how and why I felt and feel so enthralled by, and grateful for this particular anthology, I see that it’s because each of the poems encounter, engage with, and respond to landscape and language in some way that reflects what it is to perceive and participate in nature in this moment in time, on our rapidly, wildly, and profoundly changing planet. And, that —collectively and variously— the poems reflect the wonder, fear, grief, joy and all sorts of intensity and complexity that I recognize in my own experience of that participation. 

Thus enchanted, I set-to with what has become my practice when I fall in love with a text (usually a collection of poems or lyrical prose): to transcribe, as I read, individual lines that spoke to me in some way, as language, toward eventually assembling them into a cento.

For those not familiar with the form, a cento is a collage-type poem composed from whole or half lines extracted from (and often written in tribute to) another poet’s work. In the classical Greek tradition of the cento, those poets were originally Homer or Virgil, as well as various sacred texts. Contemporary cento-writers consider any source text, or combinations of them, to be fair game (For lots, lots more about the cento, see A Coat of Many Colors, my three-part series of posts on the topic from 2019).

I first started writing centos years ago mostly as a playful exercise: as a way to engage language as a primary medium, as distinct from using language simply as a delivery system for emotions and ideas. But what I quickly began to notice was that the practice itself invited me into a state of deep receptivity, and by way of that, into what I would call a kind of  field of reciprocity with a source text (per the cento’s original purpose and function as a tribute poem), more often than not resulting in poems that seemed to read me back, in surprising and often quite intimate ways.

And over the course of the twelve days at Sitka that followed my arrival, as I contemplated, combined, and recombined my collection of borrowed lines (this part of the process involved many days, as it often does) from You Are Here, returning now and then to re-savor the lines’ source poems, and as I also took long walks in the woods among spruce trees with their sleeves of moss from which ferns unfurled to drip water onto the rotting wood and leaf mold below from with fungi unfurled in great whorls, I perceived/recognized more and more viscerally (as distinct from ‘abstractly’) the reality that, as organisms, we —with the rest of life— are composed and sustained by the processes by which cells divide, multiply and organize into forms, our very being in this very moment inextricable from our continuous participation in the great vibrating symbioses of arising, lending, borrowing, uplifting, collaborating, destroying and redistribution that is the very nature of nature…

…as it is also the nature of language: to transmit, circulate and transform.

So below is the cento that eventually resulted from all of that, titled for the anthology (that word itself from the Greek anthologia, which translates as ‘a collection of flowers of verse’) that was its source, and including one line from each of the fifty poems/ poets that the collection includes and represents.

Note: while I use the cento form and process in sometimes stricter and sometimes looser ways, for this one I followed the strictest protocol, meaning that none of the lines have been altered or added to in any way. I just lifted out lines as they spoke to me. Then, once I had collected all the lines, I began to listen for the conversation they might want to have with each other.

‘On the Estuary.’ Watercolor and pencil, 10-16-2024

You Are Here 

Come back to the world to which you belong

Into field field field

The ocean leaping out of ocean

The great, bustling city of it all

That still matters

Let me enter. please, let me

I’m not coping very well, but who is, really? 

I’d be asleep if it were up to me

The moth babies flutter from sweater drawers

Risk lurks in every inch of soil as frost or scorch, and it’s painful

It was summer, the wind blew.

Because I was terrified, I learned nothing

I would like to believe in tenderness

It was the language we spoke to one another

What the sky said to me all those years ago.

Live, live, live, live!—-

I respect the patience of heartbreak and how it waits

Stillness 

Is how to make peace with anything happening

And wind, blazing and billowing like the cloak the saint wore.

What purpose, otherwise, / is grief?

What is the name for the scent that whispers mother,

In the forest, grief lives a new life

The grasses give off the damp straw smell of darkness coming on

Sunlight. water. sunlight. water. sunlight. water.

The great, buttery platters of fungus

And seeds swarming to life. Where it seems as if nothing should grow.

Such effulgence, it’s like showing a 3D movie: Gold

The marsh revels in its glitter

And sings the rains of Maui awake

What is under this water and what was once water?

These mountains have given us

These raindrops

Porches. Tomatoes in the summer

Bed linens sailing the wind, curtains flaring

Forget the stars wasting themselves across the sky

The moon won’t speak

The night is swallowing

The rain, of course, as it dings

A wet cracking and popping. I think

How much is possible

A garland of souls

Whole antlered herds under the skies, chewing

Despite the shrinking footprint of the pond, the ground

And the rest of the savanna

Let’s go be alive like that, like rattlesnakes

Which smell like wet rope, melons

The magpies, the ferryman, God, the poets, everything

At the word, at having woken

Come back to the world to which you belong

your mouth around light

And me, with you, in all this soft, wild buzzing.

‘Telling the Bees’ (after Zoë C.) water media and dry markers, 2024

Source poems, in order of appearance:

Carrie Fountain, You Belong To The World
Jake Skeets, If Fire
Donika Kelly, When the Fact of Your Gaze Means Nothing, Then You Are Truly Alongside
Alberto Rios, Twenty Minutes in the Backyard
Carl Philips, We Love in the Only Ways We Can
Ashley M Jones, Lullaby for the Grieving
Jason Schneiderman, Staircase
Michael Kleber-Diggs, Canine Superpowers
Brenda Hillman, Unendangered Moths of the Mid-Twentieth Century
Patricia Smith, To Little Black Girls, Risking Flower
Matthew Zapruder, It Was Summer, the Wind Blew
Paul Guest, Walking the Land
Cecily Parks, Hackberry
Adam Clay, Darkling I Listen
Analicia Sotelo, Quemado, Texas
Ruth Awad, Reasons to Live
Hanif Abdurraqib, There Are More Ways to Show Devotion
Monica Youn, Four Freedoms Park
Prageeta Sharma, I Am Learning to Find the Horizons of Peace
Paul Tran, Terroir
Paisley Rekdal, Taking the Magnolia
B Ferguson, Parkside & Ocean
Khadijah Queen, Tower
Ellen Bass, Lighthouse
José Olivarez, You Must Be Present,
Dorianne Laux, Redwoods
Torrin A. Greathouse, No Ethical Transition Under Late Capitalism
Jennifer L. Knox, Central Iowa, Scenic Overlook
Cedar Sigo, Close Knit Flower Sack
Brandy Nalani McDougall, Dana Naone Hall, No’u Revilla, Aia i hea ka wai o Lahaina?
Laura Dá, Bad Wolf
Kiki Petrosino, To Think of Italy While Climbing the Saunders-Monticello Trail
Ilya Kaminsky, Letters
Gabrielle Calvocoressi, An Inn for the Coven
Carolyn Forché, Night Shift in the Home for Convalescents
Roger Reeves, Beneath the Pereids
Danez Smith Two Deer in a Southside Cemetery
Joy Harjo, Eat
Rigoberto González, Summer Songs
Aimee Nexhukumatathil, Heliophilia
Kazim Ali, The Man in 119
Kevin Young, Snapdragon
Diane Seuss, Nature, Which Cannot Be Driven To
Erika Meitner, Manifesto of Fragility / Terraform
Jericho Brown, Aerial View
Traci Brimhall, Mouth of the Canyon
Eduardo C Corral, To A Blossoming Saguaro
Victoria Chang, A Woman With A Bird
Molly McCully Brown, Rabbitbrush
Carrie Fountain, You Belong To The World
Jake Skeets, If Fire
Camille T. Dungy, Remembering a honeymoon hike near Drake’s Bay, California, while I cook our dinner at the foot of Colorado’s Front Range