Christien Gholson, Eugene, Oregon, USA
Resurrection Ferns: Spells
They grow from moss on the oak’s bark, dangle
twenty feet above the earth. Fronds like seawrack;
like sea-spells, drawing a ghost-ocean closer, closer,
for 70 million years, beneath this highway bridge.
I was a drop of rain, once; slipped down the length
of this oak’s trunk for sixty years; years pilgrimed
inside phosphorescent labyrinths of moss, drawn up
steep xylem trails, tranced inside a sporangia patch.
I was part of this sea-spell, a drop; part of this sea-
spell, a spore; part of this sea-spell, a frond’s memory
of a previous life as rain, a drop, that contained a sea
turtle turning around the oak’s crown.
What is born again? I press my forehead against bark
and exhale. Transpiration draws salt water up through
the vascular trails of my body, from an ancient ocean,
a future ocean…
What’s not there calls to me
What’s not there calls to me. Can you hear it? Wind over an
empty bottle half-buried in sand, edge of the high-tide line.
Spray lifts off foam, becomes a seagull, becomes a grey veil.
I sometimes make lists of things that have replaced what’s no
longer there: microplastics, iphones, 3d printers, blockchains,
ghost nets… words that developed too quickly to have roots.
They hover just above me, their cameras send images of this
poem back to a bunker full of server racks, in a secret location
beneath the earth, where green and red lights illuminate specks
of dust. What’s not there keeps calling out to me. Do I mistake
it for the odd distant voices produced by tinnitus? Is that all it
really is? I want to know that the calls from what’s not there are
separate from my own small wounds. A gull lands nearby, eyes
me, searching for something I don’t have. I ask the gull if it hears
what’s no longer there, too. Sometimes, it says, inside an empty
crab shell. I laugh – good joke – then open my wings, flap twice,
lift off sand, and sail into the fog blowing in off the water.
Christien Gholson is the author of several books of poetry, including The No One Poems (Thirty West Publishing), On the Side of the Crow (Hanging Loose Press), All the Beautiful Dead (Bitter Oleander Press), and a novel: A Fish Trapped Inside the Wind(Parthian Books). A long eco-catastrophe-ceremony poem, “Tidal Flats”, can be found at Mudlark, along with its sequel, “Solutions for the End of the World”, at The American Journal of Poetry.
He lives in Eugene, Oregon. Visit him at http://christiengholson.blogspot.com/.
