Vivian Wagner
Genesis
Down the road from my childhood home,
an apple orchard rowed itself in the sand
between mountains, drinking what water
it could from underground reserves.
The trees were old and twisted,
producing still, but barely, the branches
beginning to rot and fall apart,
ants lining up and down the bark.
Apple trees don’t live forever.
They know this going in.
They just keep flinging fruit
into the universe, hoping
some of it
falls.
Begetting
All the sketches we make,
the water droplets we draw,
the poems we write, the
songs we sing, the x-rays
we engender: all these
become kin, a family
stretching tendril roots
into a soil of loss and decay,
finding nourishment in
molecules that form and
reform, from pies into men,
violets into waves, eggs into cats.
This white hot flash of making
is a series of questions,
a stream of jokes,
a roar of beleaguered creation,
a growing insistence on yes, and
still yes, and yes, yet
again, until even a zero
has possibility, a bubble
in the universe’s fizz.
The Universe is Yours
Emily, you help me understand it’s fine for me to sit in my room, alone, watching the robins out my window. This is everything: sunlight glinting off hemlock needles, trucks roaring like fast-moving tyrannosaurus rexes burning their own residue, mourning doves saying a quiet, insistent prayer. You help me see that there’s nowhere else to go, that this desk and moment and tree and road are the entirety. You calm me into that understanding. You move my pencil across the only paper in the world.
Vivian Wagner lives, writes, and teaches in New Concord, Ohio. She’s the author of a memoir, Fiddle: One Woman, Four Strings, and 8,000 Miles of Music (Citadel-Kensington), and a poetry collection, The Village (Kelsay Books). Visit her website at www.vivianwagner.net.
Genesis
Down the road from my childhood home,
an apple orchard rowed itself in the sand
between mountains, drinking what water
it could from underground reserves.
The trees were old and twisted,
producing still, but barely, the branches
beginning to rot and fall apart,
ants lining up and down the bark.
Apple trees don’t live forever.
They know this going in.
They just keep flinging fruit
into the universe, hoping
some of it
falls.
Begetting
All the sketches we make,
the water droplets we draw,
the poems we write, the
songs we sing, the x-rays
we engender: all these
become kin, a family
stretching tendril roots
into a soil of loss and decay,
finding nourishment in
molecules that form and
reform, from pies into men,
violets into waves, eggs into cats.
This white hot flash of making
is a series of questions,
a stream of jokes,
a roar of beleaguered creation,
a growing insistence on yes, and
still yes, and yes, yet
again, until even a zero
has possibility, a bubble
in the universe’s fizz.
The Universe is Yours
Emily, you help me understand it’s fine for me to sit in my room, alone, watching the robins out my window. This is everything: sunlight glinting off hemlock needles, trucks roaring like fast-moving tyrannosaurus rexes burning their own residue, mourning doves saying a quiet, insistent prayer. You help me see that there’s nowhere else to go, that this desk and moment and tree and road are the entirety. You calm me into that understanding. You move my pencil across the only paper in the world.
Vivian Wagner lives, writes, and teaches in New Concord, Ohio. She’s the author of a memoir, Fiddle: One Woman, Four Strings, and 8,000 Miles of Music (Citadel-Kensington), and a poetry collection, The Village (Kelsay Books). Visit her website at www.vivianwagner.net.