Forage Read online

  ALSO BY ROSE MCLARNEY

  Its Day Being Gone

  The Always Broken Plates of Mountains

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2019 by Rose McLarney

  Photography copyright © 2019 by Ginger Legato

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

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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

  Acorn no more. Blackberry blanked out. Cheetah cast off.

  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.

  It’s hard enough that a horse

  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.