ALSO BY ROSE MCLARNEY
Its Day Being Gone
The Always Broken Plates of Mountains
PENGUIN BOOKS
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Copyright © 2019 by Rose McLarney
Photography copyright © 2019 by Ginger Legato
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: McLarney, Rose, 1982– author.
Title: Forage / Rose McLarney.
Description: First edition. | New York : Penguin Books, [2019] | Series: Penguin poets
Identifiers: LCCN 2019008922 (print) | LCCN 2019009491 (ebook) | ISBN 9780143133193 (paperback) | ISBN 9780525504979 (ebook)
Subjects: | BISAC: POETRY / American / General.
Classification: LCC PS3613.C5725 (ebook) | LCC PS3613.C5725 A6 2019 (print) | DDC 811/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019008922
Cover design: Lynn Buckley
Cover photograph: Kimberly Witham
Version_1
With gratitude to Anton,
and the friends who are why I have continued to write,
and in memory of John Ervin,
who will not see this book published, but never doubted that it would be
CONTENTS
ALSO BY ROSE MCLARNEY
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
“WHAT NEED HAVE I FOR LOFTIER SONG TO SING?”
AFTER THE REMOVAL OF 30 TYPES OF PLANTS AND ANIMALS FROM THE JUNIOR DICTIONARY
ONE WAY OF POSING
WINTER HARD
PET
ADMIRING AUDUBON’S CAROLINA PARAKEETS
POEM WITH A SLUR AND A PUN IN IT
MANY KINDS MAKE THE CROWD
AFTER HEARING OF HIS PASSING
AND STILL I WANT TO BRING LIFE INTO THIS WORLD
FIRST IN RIGHT
IN A DRY COUNTY
PEACH JUICE
A PARTICIPATION OF WATERS
BEFORE THE FIRST BELL
WHO STAYS
RETURN VISIT
PASTORAL
FINE DUST
REPEAL
WHAT SURVIVES
MOTIONLESS
ACCRUAL
PRESERVATION
THE JEWELS WITH WHICH TO MAKE DO, THE JEWELS THAT THERE WERE
AMERICAN PERSIMMON
AMBITIONS
I LIVE NEARBY
EVENINGS SLIP INTO EARLY LIGHT
ABUNDANCE
FULL CAPACITY
UNCOLLECTED
THE RIND REMAINS
HEREAFTER
SEASONAL
EXPRESSION
SIGNS MAY SAY “DON’T TOUCH”
LITTLE MONSTER, MASTERPIECE
“MAKE SOMETHING OUT OF IT”
ON THE MOVE
FRESH TRACKS
WITH THE GEORGICS’ LAST WORD
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
“WHAT NEED HAVE I FOR LOFTIER SONG TO SING?”
—Virgil
In the subdivision, walk looking at the pavement
for spatterings and pits. These from falling plums
no one will pick, not in this setting. In this setting, but
still in the season for fruit. With something to feed on.
Walk looking down so as to know when to look up.
AFTER THE REMOVAL OF 30 TYPES OF PLANTS AND ANIMALS FROM THE JUNIOR DICTIONARY
But if no almond, because the young will use language for nature less,
by that logic, no arousal, brief surge of blood that cannot continue
but lets lives be conceived. If no bluebell because flowers are fleeting,
no beauty to begin with for these bodies which wither. If no cygnet,
the downy being preceding permanent feathers, then no childhood
since those who are sheltered under a wing cannot stay, not the same.
As we might wish mother, many children’s earliest word, will always
be one they hold in mind, could we let their mouths keep
mistletoe, minnow, and magpie? Leave a few things intact,
allow the possibility of turning books’ pages back
to lobster, leopard, lark, then forward to last—to lasting—to live.
ONE WAY OF POSING
Surrogate, transfer, substitute, ersatz—I set out
to say something of an animal without any of that,
not making it enact some strand of human behavior.
Not the peaceful dove, foreboding crow,
hawk standing for fierceness.
The animal itself. The awareness of nerves
connected to feathers, each quill in the quiver
of skin, inscribing sensation.
What experience is when one is a bird,
does not smell, taste, or wish to stand on the dirt much,
can fly, and swim too, through wind and water
with light bones.
But to put an animal on the page is to still it.
To care for it is to cage it.
Audubon had his birds printed
on the largest pages ever made, at the time.
Yet the birds are contorted, curled and crushed into the corners,
the images always searching out more space, the subjects
too vibrant to be bound in a book.
Who doesn’t know Audubon shot the birds he admired,
stuffed them to make models?
The birds I can study are chickens
in the traffic ahead, crammed into crates, stacked on semis.
The waste of their feathers blows back,
and sometimes their whole bodies, in their only
bone-breaking instance of flight. They lie along the roadside,
bodies misshapen by breeding—a great weight on their chests.
It’s breast meat, no metaphor.
Though it speaks of us, as must all the animals, live
and on legs like ours, suspended on highway sides,
where habitats are cut in two. Preparing to cross,
many take the same last pose, lifting one tentative paw,
already, off the earth.
WINTER HARD
When the forest caught fire, the horses
obeyed a fear greater
than what had been bred into them,
broke down the stable, and stampeded
for the opening in the trees,
which was the lake, which was water.
Of course they headed toward
the alternative, liquid,
unlike the material that made
or was burning up the hard world
they had to escape.
It was the 1940s, the bombardment
by Central Powers that started the fir
e,
in Finland. This is Malaparte’s story.
By his account, hundreds of horses
sped through flames, splashed in,
and the second they entered, the lake
froze solid.
Which makes no sense. But never mind
science. The idea stays with us.
Snap—they were suspended,
coated and sealed, suddenly. And singly,
though the herd had entered as a whole.
It could be called tragic because
they were entombed, heads up,
so all winter, soldiers could see
the last shapes failed struggles take.
It could be asserted that the animal face—
flared nostrils, flung mane,
all frozen—is a simplified expression
of human experience.
Something might be said about that war,
what we fight now.
But to merit retelling
there need not be double meaning.
had to seek escape and was denied it,
even in decay.
Divisions are hard, how one side does not
see itself in the other, or crystallized,
cast in that clear ice.
The horror of each is its own,
alone. Beyond comparison,
and compassion. The soldiers are said
to have walked among the horses
like a sculpture garden on their smoke breaks.
Casually, to be by themselves,
between the bodies, they went
to light their little fires.
The individual man’s flame was too small
to make anything melt.
And not even summer could turn
the sharp edge of this back to water.
PET
The way the cat walked,
stalking—Each step
an extraction of himself,
from the grass, unmoved.
How long I watched,
how I loved
to watch, and how I tried
to make him a little home.
But what is wanted wants
to leg it elsewhere, no matter.
When he was happy,
he was hunting.
He was hunting
the exception to his silence—
that is what he wished to eat.
He would slaughter
his way back to solitude.
ADMIRING AUDUBON’S CAROLINA PARAKEETS
Green and red and yellow and yammering,
Carolina parakeets once flashed in the forests.
Flocks so big they blocked out the sun.
Flocks so faithful, when one was hurt, hundreds
would fly back to hover with her.
Which made it fast work to shoot them all.
Which was done, for feathers for hats.
And by farmers whose fields their appetites
had fallen upon. Splitting every apple, every pear,
looking for a kind of seed that wasn’t there, yet eating
none. None is how many survive extinction.
There is one print Audubon made of them, paper
tinted tropical colors, in a museum I can go to.
And often I do, seeking brightness, seeking birdsong.
But the image is a warning call, is about waste.
There’s a dwindling woodland beyond the window
turned away from, by me in my admiring, by art
finding its ending. Our tending to head back to the dead.
POEM WITH A SLUR AND A PUN IN IT
A man should admire rambler roses,
so resilient their vines green what was bare
ground in a single season, then scale up
and overtake trees, strangle whole canopies,
if he can stand his own sort.
And prize redbreast sunfish,
that flash a brilliant blood color. They breed
in streams where native trout cannot now
because the water is too hot, because the shade
was bush-hogged away. Though some
have named the plants that fill in after a clear-cut
pickaninny pines, his is the most tolerant
of species. Which is to say, where such a kind
succeeds, no others can.
MANY KINDS MAKE THE CROWD
There’s an old story in the newspaper—about a circus
in 1916, and its elephant. She danced in costume,
kept company with clowns, could play horn
and pitch baseball, and was marching in a parade
when she stopped. Her keeper goaded her.
She struck back. Too hard for his skull to stand.
Then the big show, the crowd convening, the crowd calling
for an execution. The beating, the bullets, the electrocution.
Finally, a crane, a chain that bore her up and didn’t break.
Among all the possible material, someone has scavenged
for details to print such as these. It is true, too,
that before her hanging, the elephant had been foraging,
lifting picnickers’ fruit rinds from the dirt.
But such sweetness does not make history.
And, from the photo of the mob, there’s no picking out
the man who thought only to carry his child to a circus
that day. Before he finds he also holds
the ability to hang a body.
AFTER HEARING OF HIS PASSING
I kept sliding lemon under the skin
and herbs into the openings
of a chicken, its cold countering
the recalled warmth of eggs
in the time when we
collected them fresh
from beneath hens. Our hands,
feather-brushed, found ways
to come near one another.
We took the birds’ eggs. We took
their lives too, if raccoons didn’t
first, eating the craw full of grain
only and leaving the body
to waste, as the whole of him
does now that he’s dead young.
Most waste I can avoid (I’d save hearts,
sauté livers, when we slaughtered).
But not the truth that I have handled
his body, intimately, and other beings’
entrails. And I still make meals.
We were born into a world with predators.
We have lived, from the beginning,
knowing how we were created,
sharp-toothed and hungry.
But not who would have the pleasure
of feeding, when one would feel the pain
of prey. I will serve another chicken,
and I may say its cooked skin is golden,
a kind of exaltation. And the sorrow
will be biting. And birds will keep surviving.
Scavenging insects and flesh from the sick
of their flocks, seeds from sunflowers
and blossoms from rosebushes in reach.
AND STILL I WANT TO BRING LIFE INTO THIS WORLD
Aquifers are so depleted it would take a great flood
to replenish them, says the radio broadcast.
I am driving from a doctor’s appointment, imagining
the millions of us, our failed fields, washed over.
A boat, two of each animal boarding again:
&n
bsp; bear and cub, elephant and calf, ape and baby.
But when the reporter says the earth is sinking,
he is not speaking of waves. The soil is falling
to a lower level beneath our feet because groundwater
is gone: a dry drowning.
And the flood fable is the one of male and female, not
mother and child. I can think only of the news
that I may have no children, when there are more
than the world can manage to keep alive.
Must the answer be only the variety
of grief? If not to envy all the irrigated orchards bore,
to sorrow for the trees, sprayed and sterile?
FIRST IN RIGHT
A subdivision’s plumbing is a predictable grid,
unlike the errant growth of stalk and vine he’s irrigated,
thinks the farmer who sells his water rights, looking ahead.
With the river, it seems nothing moves forward.
Between the mudflats, the fish bones un-swimming.
The banks’ dry lips mouthing something about,
My shape made by millions of years filled with—
But the rule of water doctrine is, First in time, first in right.
It refers to what was set in writing, not to when
the path of the river was cut. Contracts protect
the claims of impoundment and pipe, price every drop.
There are laws against gathering rain. Too late
for the low basins in the land, the rusted bucket
left out in the field, the fallen log’s bowl. And the flower
on damp mornings, that undocumented cup, collecting
another kind of dues?
IN A DRY COUNTY
Men are said to have run moonshine stills. Maybe they weren’t
criminal, they were contemplative. Creeks could cool boiling
liquor, but the true fire was in their feelings for the woods.
That’s why they spent days wandering up whitewater.