Elizabeth Robinson


A Season


Life is natural
in the evolution
of matter
—Lorine Niedecker

 

The place, as it ages, loses
the words for itself. How gracefully

the forest accommodates to the loss
of the word “tree” while

the lake founders looking for
this word, “water.”

Distantly, in the mind of the place
—what is place?—
leaves and rain fall.

Untroubled, unassuming
—what is mind?—
the landscape embraces

a kind of dementia,
a kind of composting.

*

All the losses
refurbish themselves
with something like beauty.

A fire sweeps through
and erases
—what?

Now the landscape
is true to its nakedness,

berm and hill and crag.

What was always there
breaks through the absence

like a new revelation.

The grass, the branch and
leaf that obscured this horizon

are not extinct,
just rubbed from memory.

*

She says she is having trouble
recalling words. What

is the word for the green,
tasty things you chop

so fine and put in the omelet?

She can’t find “herbs” but
as I hear, I hear the resilience

of a burn site after rain—"green,”
“delicious,” tender under blade

or heel. So much flora, so
many words springing up

around the emptiness.

*

She says, “Thank you for
being so patient while

I seek the word I want.”
But I want the word too,

the shimmer of a thing
that was briefly dull.

Daylight reasserts itself
as it moves, always moves,

around the obstacles that
we call nature. Light

in the tree means tree. And light’s
slanting angle to the ground

means dusk. Means that soon

what we saw, we will no longer
see.

*

In winter, the lake is one thing:
hard. It’s edges gray and cracked like

aged skin. In summer the same
thing is a different thing:

balmy water, mud soft and green
between the toes.

In our bereft world, the one thing
is at the same time two things,

mother and daughter. She,
whichever she is,

makes all names one—
the one who just traveled
to Japan

is no less than the one
who stayed home and bought
her groceries.

Ground that is frozen is
no different from ground

that is fluid. What

is mind? A thing scrubbed,
of nature’s obstacles

until the light makes it bare.

*

Emily Dickinson wrote of
the mind as deciduous as

a tree. I remember
the startle of that image

and nothing else
about the poem from which

it came. A place borne
away from itself. The ruddy

blood oranges of my parents’
backyard. My mother

falling in the icy winter of
her childhood and remembering

the infected wound from the
vantage of her ninety third year.

Mind and place slowly
fuse, degrade into

blood, wound, good soil,
fruit.

*

Time is gracious to its own
muteness. Nuts or leaves

drop from a thing for which
we have no name, only that

it speaks around and above its trunk
with roots, branches.

Nobody, nothing
     ever gave me
        greater thing

than time—

*

From that
supple, liquid body

we once knew as
“lake” something

transposes itself
and also falls as rain

amid leaf, twig.

*

Is it true that eventually
time will decompose

like a song whose words
we can no longer

recall? A lost place,
or a place in which
we are lost,

humming without lyric,
and then ceasing to hum
toward

      light
        and silence

which if intense
     makes sound

Also by Elizabeth Robinson: "On Pattern"

 

Elizabeth Robinson is a recent Pushcart Prize winner and will have a poem in 2024 Best American Poetry. Her recent books are Excursive (Roof Books) and Thirst & Surfeit (Threadsuns). Northwestern University Press will publish her collection Vulnerability Index in 2025.

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