Root River comes from The Greenwood Poet, a book that came out last week as part of my ongoing romance with doubling my years on odd years and then writing that many poems.

I spent a couple of years, off and on, writing about the gothic fantastic and the environment and death, before and after COVID (thought that obviously wasn’t the original intent). I’m going to serialize them on the site for subscribers. If you subscribe for three months, you’ll get this for free. And besides, subscribing is free for the first seven days, so why not try out the Showbear archive?

Of course — 20% will be free for everyone and I encourage you to pick up a copy of the hardback.

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Root River

The pond by the tombs was punctured and drained
Into the echo of the aquifer
And it burst and blanket the boundless heights
Of the deep dark to don some old
Island’s archipelago and the East River
Forms flying far to the north
Splitting hillsides and sowing Greenwood
In the crags and crusts the crews blast
But whose bridges flaccid barely lasted
The weekend rust, weakened, untrusted, 
The memory of man. Makes lunches 
Of urban centers, eating the civic, 
Returning towers to time’s flowers–
Grass growing in groves on crags, 
Steel to slags and our summerings to ice.

We stack stones, stealing from the vista
Of mountains unmade in the morning upstate,
Creatures — crags — cry to the sky
And summon their songs of circlets and orbits.
The leak leaves to loam stones
And bring bones to beach stone
Statues like marbles or strands of beach glass, 
Everest to Epcot by the evening spray
Of Greenwood’s waters and the grey of the thing
Who could be dead. It can’t quite take.
North and north and near the back
Of Boreas hides the blame of day,
The path of the grace to the pool risen 
And the nonentity of nobles and rich–
Upstate… well it isn’t a second home. 
The river and groves root here first. 

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Photo by Adam Bouse on Unsplash