Julia Spicher Kasdorf Reflections
2017–2018
Eastern Box Turtle
Twin Bridges
A pair of eyes so much smaller
than mine, yet we both stop: red eyes
— a male — horned beak, clawed feet,
tail, and those glorious golden glyphs
on his perfectly fitted carapace. Mister,
I remember Thomas E. Peachey, born 1914,
grandpa who tiled a “V” below
the dome of the silo for my grandma,
Vesta, and when she died, he married
Verna. Who farmed until he retired
to the planing mill, and all his life hunted
the ridges near here, pausing to carve
his initials and the date onto turtle shells.
Once in the last century, as I watched
him incise a scuffed plastron
with his pen knife, a trace of blood
seeped from one of the letters.
With apologies for him and his kind,
I turn the turtle over to find
no human lines.
What the Hemlock Said
Rudy Saw Mill
Think of the energy it took
four brothers and their mules
to hack through roots, pry rocks,
haul earth, and dig the race
to divert enough water to turn
the wheel. Think of the wheel
splashing power to push blades
the length of their neighbors’ logs.
Think of the limbs smoldering
under mud and leaves to make fuel
for the stone furnaces at Monroe
and Greenwood to melt the ore
dug up from the earth around here,
to forge the cannons for war.
American Chestnut Plantation
Utter it and castanets clatter:
nineteenth century cabins —
especially the bottom logs prone to rot —
floor boards, fence posts, rail road ties,
plantation, plantation, plantation.
Under the spreading chestnut tree…
A third or half of the trees in this forest
were once giant chestnuts. In autumn
whatever nuts the squirrels didn’t hoard
hogs and cows foraged to fatten for winter
or holiday’s slaughter. Chestnuts
stuffed the turkey, thickened the pudding.
…roasting by an open fire.
Stench of charcoal scorching the nuts’
split jackets on the streets of New York.
Scent of human sperm, these pale tendrils
dusted with pollen in the plantation
where saplings flourish
in dated, plastic tubes.
Pull my chestnut out of the fire.
Ghosts of blighted chestnuts
survive underground and send up
shoots that finally die.
Oh, that old chestnut!
Science will find a hybrid, but how
to reckon nostalgia’s debt?
“Unnamed Tributary”
Dark Cliffy Place
Call it sun splashing on wet rock.
Call it brittle twigs of hemlock,
shale outcrop of the Appalachian
Revolution. Call it stone bed, stone wall,
not far from man-made foundations,
not far from an ancient apple tree.
Call it fern preserve, root splay,
all manner of moss. Call it crayfish
where the stream deepens and bends.
Call it iridescence of damsel fly,
wing black night far from cities.
Call it refuge, regeneration,
shadow home, hold still.
Black
Blue Bird Trail
In the meadow, two metalmarks flex
spotted wings on orange butterfly weed.
Sweet, black grit in your teeth
and white nubs among raspberry leaves.
Grasses clot cellar stairs that descend
into a stone foundation. Do you
hesitate to step into the pit
where black walnuts fall and grow
into thin trees striving for light?
Among daisies along the path,
see one black-eyed Susan?
It’s later than you think.
Summer Solstice
Lake Perez, built 1961
Engineered rain basin,
sky shine,
wind bedazzle,
what swims beneath your glitter?
minnows, fin fish, crayfish
Beneath them?
tree stumps, mud
Before that?
forest
Before that?
a barley field
And before?
wood hicks, charcoalers, soot,
tannen staining the stream
Before?
I can’t remember
What comes after?
Hush
No, what?
Remove your shoes.
Lake Trail, January
On this rare day, it’s easy enough to jump
to metaphors: the lichen-crusted tree trunk,
a wild turkey breast ruffed with fine stripes
of tan and brown, or sap-tipped cones
fallen from the white pine, shadow and light.
Easy to pick up a fat acorn and call its cap
tweed. Or the bleached grass beneath
the powerline, a woman’s hair, blond
and worse for the weather. Leaves,
frozen and thawed into brittle slips, stick
to the path which, clotted with ice, runs
like a stream this warm afternoon. Easy to see
patches of fern moss as scraps of jungle,
mood moss, the shaved scalps of soldiers.
The lake, solid aqua, cross-hatched, mottled,
softens in the sun as run-off shimmers
down the spillway in white-rimmed scallops.
Easy to think of time’s thin rings hidden
behind pine bark. Hard to see it all and not
make up names for things. Harder to release
the layers of bright and dull weight I carry
as I walk this ring of earth around the lake.
Julia Spicher Kasdorf is author of Shale Play: Poems and Photographs from the Fracking Fields, a documentary collaboration with Steven Rubin, and three other books of poetry, Sleeping Preacher, Eve’s Striptease, and Poetry in America. Her poetry has received the Agnus Lynch Starrett Prize, The Great Lakes Colleges Award for New Writing, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Pushcart Prize. She is also the author of a book of essays, The Body and the Book: Writing from a Mennonite Life, and a biography, Fixing Tradition: Joseph W. Yoder, Amish American. With Michael Tyrell she edited Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn, and with Josuah Brown produced new editions of Joseph W. Yoder’s Rosanna of the Amish and Fred Lewis Pattee’s House of the Black Ring. She teaches poetry writing at The Pennsylvania State University, where she is professor of English and women’s gender, and sexuality studies.
Visit Julia’s website for more on her and her work.
(Photo credit: Zsuzsanna Nagy)
