To Acknowledge What Someone Else Says
In the eyes of this North Carolina poet, everything—even that which is not “eco”—is part of an ecosystem.
I WANT SOMETHING STRONGER THAN WATER,
I overhear you say, stranger
at the airport. Never mind your own
largely liquid body weight, your veins
coursing rusty seawater, the vast aquifer
that spreads out beneath the concrete under
our feet, or the bay rolling
a few miles away, its sandy-mud floor
bedded with skeletons of whales and bones
of sturdy ships which clasp in turn
their careful pilots’ bones. Never
mind that though the mushroom
clouds scattered their death-radiant
spores, though no bacterium remained
alive to enable decay, to stop those tides
breathing in and out their rotting clouds
of eutrophic algae, we’d have to shatter
the moon. Never mind the eel elver,
the winged skate, the shallow widgeongrass
forests still sheltering some pipefish,
gudgeon, blue crab, or how under
the touch of the northeast wind
or the tug of that cloudy moon, water
everywhere stretches itself skyward into crest
and swell, the merest nameless twine
of creek-branch gaining flesh
each second from each millimeter of rain,
every coveside seep, every trickle from every
rock ridge in its watershed, until current
becomes torrent. Never mind the tsunami.
Never mind how water grows to fill wetlands and swamp
cellars, how in the end it drowns the angriest
fire, how, mother of elements, it dissolves air
and even earth into the body of itself
and carries them all wherever it is going,
stronger than nearly anything. I know
you haven’t thought of all that never-mind,
but who am I to judge. For decades I too
thought the ebb of my weakness ran so endless,
so vast, that I too must need
what I believed then
could be stronger than water,
something more than everything.
SEARCH ENGINES IN THE LAND OF SORES
My first scientist told me to be a biologist was to have eyes
in a land of sores peopled by the blind: that only
those who’d been taught to see could see
the slow fade of the shad runs, the uptick in ticks
that carry Lyme, TVA’s blue haze blurring mountains,
or how the invasive white Bradford pear foamed
in bloom over those hills in March.
Only those lucky enough to have heard woodcocks
or whippoorwills or the fuzzy ground beetles bumbling
at the summer screens could hear when they fell still.
To those less lucky, warming was just the weather,
there had never been dusky seaside sparrows, the reeling world
was just the world, and doesn’t all skin have sores?
was just the world, and doDecades later I searched
for that quote, having by then turned to literature, where they fail
you when you fail to acknowledge what someone else says,
but failed to find it, even when the internet rose
up and swarmed across the world like sores,
claiming to be the new mycelial web
of delicate fungal threads connecting everything
ever, promising everything ever, but failing
over and over to answer what I’d asked, a country blind
to its scabby gaps, over and over failing
to see or say from where those words came—
like that image came from him, my father, like the name
of the pear came from my mother, like everything
we have and everything we do and everything
we are comes from the earth—failing
over and over to acknowledge the source.
About the author
Catherine Carter’s poetry collections with LSU Press includeLarvae of the Nearest Stars,The Swamp Monster at Home,and The Memory of Gills, with a fourth,By Stone and Needle, forthcoming in fall 2025. Her work has also appeared inBest American Poetry, Orion, Poetry,Ploughshares, RHINO,andEcotone, among others,and she lives with her spouse in Cullowhee, North Carolina, where she is a professor of English Studies at Western Carolina University.