The Mouth of Earth

Poems

Sarah P. Strong

• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781948908856
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

In this timely and moving collection of poems, Sarah P. Strong explores what it means to live in a world undergoing an irrevocable transformation, the magnitude of which we barely comprehend. A broad range of perspectives shows us different times and places on Earth while unfolding the cyclical nature of human denial and response. A series of linked persona poems about the Dust Bowl recounts the destruction of the Great Plains and how human dreams of plenty destroyed the ancient fertility and stability of the land, how heartbreak and denial contended with bureaucratic insolence. In an imagined view of our planet as it might appear millennia from now, the Earth is "a worry stone / in the pocket of space, or a mood ring / on the finger of a newly minted / god." The Mouth of Earth serves as both a survival guide for those seeking connection with our planet and one another as well as a compassionate tribute to what we have lost or are losing—the human consequences of such destruction in a time of climate crisis and lost connectivity. Strong's powerful poems offer us, if not consolation, at least a way toward comprehension in an age of loss, revealing both our ongoing denial of our planet's fragility and the compelling urgency of our hunger for connection with all life.

I

Fire Burns Grass

On the third day of the wildfire she answers.

I press the ancient phone receiver to my head.

This phone—so old I think I’m talking

to the dead sometimes. Talk to me. Talk to me.

She says, Remember when we changed the game?

Three fingers at her lips meant water.

My hand upturned, half-opened, stood for grass.

Her fist, bursting into fingers, meant flames.

Yes—talk to me.

The phone at my face like an oxygen mask.

But not the rules. We kept the rules the same.

(grass drinks water)

(water puts out fire)

(fire burns grass)

Will you have to leave your house?

She laughs at that. Her laugh: a match struck

in a rainstorm, impossible spark

of old longing inside me.

Outside my window,

the springtime is coming apart;

sheets of rain

clog the sewer with drowned cherry blossoms.

Are you still there?

I’m thirsty but I can’t reach the sink,

the phone’s umbilicus is already stretched taut. Outside,

a gust of wind tears a branch from the dogwood.

Oh, yes. Rooted to my spot.

Mobile

It seems it’s not enough for us

to love the earth the way we loved, as infants,

a milky nipple. What the teacher meant

when he told his students, Carry water in a sieve!

No one could until, at cliff’s edge, he showed them—

flung the metal basket into the Pacific.

But we don’t sink into the world like that.

We rise up from the earth’s breast

and crane our necks over the grasses, distracted

by a glimpse of shiny things. You can see it

in the baby by eight months:

she’ll be nursing along in the garden of contentment

until some glint of motion snags her eye,

and the world not even named yet—

that blur of green is not yet

“flock of wild parakeets in northern coastal city,”

the pink flash not yet classified

as “musical mobile of plastic ponies,”

a baby shower gift I could not bring myself to keep:

the music box rendered “The Blue Danube Waltz”

as a series of electronic beeps

while the ponies rotated, trailing a squishy plastic smell

that reminded me variously of asthma attacks,

factory workers in China, and Barbie dolls.

I saw the real Blue Danube once,

muddy with rain in Vienna, a river

whose headwaters start before the Roman Empire

and run through two world wars,

bearing fascism and Freudian psychology

and schnitzel all downriver to pour into the Black Sea

of our seemingly endless need to keep playing with matches.

To see what will catch light. I’ve heard

the real “Blue Danube” too—

once, from a man sitting alone on the edge

of the stage that was the twentieth century,

plucking the notes of the waltz on a classical guitar

with such exquisite tension between the sweeping music

of the river and the tiny syncopated pattern

of dancing feet that at least one person

in the sparse and hurried lunch-hour audience

put down her cell phone and wept.

Magpies like shiny objects too. As do

starlings, blue jays, crows. Perhaps the commonality

persists in us like our desire for flight, the way

a line of music can persist

until someone fashions the memory

of a time those notes flooded the banks of our feelings

with a mechanical ghost of itself

that plays us at our plastic worst. When what we wanted

was the green breath of those first fields,

blown toward us by the moving shapes of horses.

Border

Things different over there

the words for them different

the things themselves

all the same

she put her flesh

in the mouth of a coyote

so that he would take her

a cross

to mark the place

where someone

died trying

two white sticks

the ghost of cactus

and the clouds

back and forth

over our heads

an edge of thinking

beyond which we don’t go

to save face

which is burning

the other country so close

one good arm

could break a window

On the Road to California

The eye thirsts for rest, the blood for s...