Leah Poole Osowski Reflections
2019–2020
The Creek Journals, also known as the Long-term Ecological Reflections Project (LTERP), began in 2006 as Shaver’s Creek celebrated 25 years as Penn State’s nature center. At that time, Penn State’s Archaeological Field School was conducting a dig on the former Daniel Massey property near Shaver’s Creek, where they unearthed artifacts from the late 1800s — about 150 years before this project began. The archaeologists had to speculate about what happened at these locations and what the artifacts meant. Through the Creek Journals, we intend to record a piece of the next century’s history in some fashion so that future generations can better learn the story of this place.
The project is, according to conceiver Ian Marshall, a “study in place.” It seeks to record what happens at eight locations in and around Shaver’s Creek Environmental Center over the course of a full century — through the lens of authors and artists from a variety of disciplines. Below, we are happy to introduce poet Leah Poole Osowski’s reflections from her visitations to each site over the course of a year.
Watch: Leah reads two poems from her Creek Journal here.
Twin Bridges
Sky threatens dangerous thunderstorms
but Twin Bridges is unphased, busy
with its water works, jays daring the slate clouds to break.
It’s been humid for days, mid-eighties to finish May hard,
after cool weeks. And now the spring greens, here
in all their sharp new.
Common dewberry strangles the marsh, skunk cabbage broad
and repeating. They say this creek’s banks house mink.
I last saw one scuttling amid the ice on the Gihon River in Vermont.
A poet from Montana writes me back: Gorgeous and vicious creatures.
Everywhere in the world, a virus is spreading, unforgiving.
The minks move by bounding gaits, slow their hearts in the cool water.
Rudy Sawmill
The waterwheel ghost is quiet,
letting May drift down Shaver’s Creek, undiverted.
The mill race just a gully of broken branches,
oak leaves left from a lighter fall.
Ferns flirt with tall grass, occasional blush
of wild geranium, golden ragwort of knee-tall stems.
Shaver’s Creek churning up the long light
of these solstice-leaning evenings.
Say there’s two creek stones for every day
after the Rudy brothers felled their trees,
say the bent hemlock that bows over the creek
to the North is aching toward their past, only holding
life by the roots. And this fallen hemlock
on the opposite bank is already gone, back to 1896
when most things may or may not have been simpler.
The water is only six inches where it pools the deepest,
the mayflowers only three inches tall in the understory,
a century barely brushes our calves, as it races by,
horse-blind, eyes front and center.
Chestnut Plantation
We climb the striated road, like wind
caught in space between stone.
September light low gold
on four cattails at the fence corner,
the meadow grasshoppers taking wing.
They say before the blight, one in four trees
in Pennsylvania was an American chestnut.
Then forty years of devastation, the killing
of cambium, split bark and lost burrs.
And now an attempt. Orchards to breed
and backcross tolerance and resistance,
leaves with saw-tooth edges, biting back.
These plantation trees look young, crowded
by tall grass and the insistent hum of insects.
We watch them angle their necks, straighten
their trunks, daydreaming of branches heavy
with fruit.
Dark Cliffy Spot
Trees grow out of the cliff, clinging like bodies,
broken evergreen branches, like turnstiles, gating us in.
The cliff abuts a stream only two inches deep.
It’s almost five p.m., two days before the autumnal equinox,
and the hemlock stand crack their joints.
Two fallen trees, one U-shaped and then straight. If I was a tree
I’d bend my trunk towards moving water as well.
Most of the sound here is falling
things. Birds someone has spent half their life identifying.
Across Lake Perez, Jamaica lifts her hawk tail and shits,
refusing with stillness to hit the scales. The longer I stand here
in silence, I feel the forest returning to itself, clearing its throat,
lifting its roots a bit higher so you can see underneath.
The black walnuts split open, show autumn their rotten hearts.
Bluebird Meadow
Thunder and humidity, May divisive in her ending.
Phlox and clover, golden ragwort, daisy fleabane
the ephemerals carpeting the path in green.
Gnats on gnats and honeysuckle getting heady.
I tear a leaf from an early milkweed,
check its white blood.
The meadow comes sloped and pungent. It’s quiet here
for birdsong and bees, Indian grass at knee-height,
skimming mild sentences against our calves.
A pair of cedar waxwings in the black walnuts.
Their high-pitched thin song. Stripe of black mask.
Some with red tips on the secondaries of their wings.
They swallow their berries whole.
In The Meadow, James Galvin writes, He lived so close
to the real world, it almost let him in.
The tree in the center of this green halo, wrapped in vine
like some insistent prayer.
Lake Perez
It’s seven p.m. on a Saturday in September, a trace of carrion
on the southwest shore teases all the raptors, the lake reflects the sky,
and a college kid in a pale-pink sweatshirt and matching baseball hat
is taking round two of lakeside pre-sunset pics, the cumulus matching
his ensemble perfectly as if both planned this dusky pastel appointment.
I wonder if his Instagram post, #lakelife, will include a swipe right
for the Easter-toned selfie, and when the last time he went swimming was
and whether it was in a hot tub or a whirlpool and what’s the difference.
Does he know there’s a whole school of yellow perch who survived
the dewatering upstream? They lay their egg strands all over these acres.
Raptor Center
At the party, a rat snake sheds its skin
the handler wraps the hide around his neck like a scarf and is taking
pictures by the windows.
The owls in their mews barely
focusing their twilight eyes as a crab ball rolls under a table.
A poet at the party says the word
circumambulate
and I remember the last time I saw the rat snake
she had coiled around and over and under herself and I
wonder if it’s possible for them to knot their own bodies.
Jerudi, the barred owl, lifts her one wing and fly-hops
into her bath pan, beaks a bright red crayfish and I wonder
if she dreams of her lost wing
and if her feathers rest on someone’s mantle, collecting light and dust.
Some snakes can see the infrared wavelengths
our bodies emit, and owls
rotate their heads 270 degrees, a pooling system collecting blood
to power their brains when circulation cuts off.
All that looking.
If I could, I would cloud my eyes blue, slough my skin, roost
in tree cavities, and pass through the world.
The Lake Trail
Near the podium, Rodney fans the air
with a hawk wing and we hear wind. Then the owl’s,
and nothing. Later, in the dark on the boardwalk
Orion in the west hangs over the new mews
of the raptors, hidden by bare trees, and how dim
the hunter looks among all these other stars,
the Milky Way, Aldebaran glinting red in Taurus,
and Venus, a spotlight on the shore.
Rodney calls for barred owls. Who cooks for you?
Again, and again, and they don’t answer.
Fifteen of us on the planks,
trying to invoke some sort of reverence
for these elusory birds. If they’re here,
they can hear — among the hibernation
of frogs in half-frozen mud — our want.
Yesterday, John said, It feels like there’s something missing
and out the window, February
fixed her yellow eyes and slowly rotated her head.
Leah Poole Osowski is the author of hover over her (Kent State University Press 2016), chosen by Adrian Matejka for the 2015 Wick Poetry Prize. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Southern Review, Georgia Review, The Cincinnati Review, Gettysburg Review, and Ninth Letter, among others. Her nonfiction has appeared in Black Warrior Review, Indiana Review, and Quarterly West. She has received fellowships from Image Journal’s Glen Workshop and the Vermont Studio Center, and she is poetry editor of Raleigh Review. Originally from Massachusetts, she holds an MFA from the University of North Carolina Wilmington. She was the 2018 Emerging Writer in Residence at Penn State Altoona.
Visit Leah’s website for more on her and her work.
