Refugia

Poems

Kyce Bello

• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781948908344
• eBook ISBN: 9781948908337
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Poésie

Winner of the 2020 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards 
Winner of the inaugural Interim 2018 Test Site Poetry Series Prize

Refugia is a bright and hopeful voice in the current conversation about climate change. Kyce Bello's stunning debut ponders what it means to inhabit a particular place at a time of enormous disruption, witnessing a beloved landscape as it gives way to, as Bello writes, "something other and unknown, growing beyond us." Ultimately an exploration of resilience, Refugia brings to life the author's home ground in Northern New Mexico and carefully observes the seasons in parallel with personal cycles of renewal and loss. These vivid poems touch upon history, inheritance, drought, and most of all, trees—be they Western conifers succumbing to warming temperatures, ramshackle orchards along the Rio Grande, or family trees reaching simultaneously into the past and future.

Like any wilderness, Refugia creates a terrain that is grounded in image and yet many-layered and complex. These poems write us back into an ecological language of place crucial to our survival in this time of environmental crisis.

I

Refugia (1)

The letter came, a white wing.

The envelope opened

like the sphinx moth

whose careening

maps the garden’s scrawled branches,

or the mourning dove

in the apple tree who calls

at dawn before lifting

from her nest.

Every evening the moth alights

on each blooming weed.

Every morning, that haunting

cry out the window.

I write back in pine needles, beetle wings,

say, look how far we have flown

in our flaming wreck.

Our trajectory a measure

of water stress,

tree death a status in three: plant, region, globe.

My hand in yours.

We have undergone, transpired,

and here we are at collapse—

Though sun reaches our faces

we hold ourselves apart

and name ourselves

after what we survived.

Dear Future Child

The winter the oil dipped

in the barrels and the desert was gridded

for drills and all the new wars began

was like every other except we learned

to sing harmonies as the children slept,

and now and then rain clattered the roof.

He found the notes we needed.

I held the melody lightly between my lips, lightly

as they say to do with questions

and other things that waver in our hands.

On nights we didn’t take down our instruments

I wrote a book of letters. Each one began

Dear Future Child.

In the distance between us, invasive roses

make the back passage impassable—

Bars of small leaf and barb.

The letters always end with a bouquet of purple asters that wilt

before I can weave them into crowns.

I drive to the market for more flowers

wishing that driving were already banned

and remember that at night when we sing,

the moment our voices separate is the moment they

become beautiful.

The Ashram at Leigh Mill Road

Imagine the herbarium I might have made

in childhood. Jewelweed houses

in the seep and furrow.

Paths winnowing verdant darkness.

Before we left those woods,

we gathered every sunrise

to pray and belong to one another.

In the green, dogwood arms of Virginia,

my own name was holy.

When we left, we did not take anything.

My name fettered into freight,

the warm creature of it held.

Every day I wake up and wonder

if I should trouble myself with belief,

and if so, in what. The world green

and long-legged out the window,

runoff guttering to the creek.

Guide to Flowering Plants

The old herbalist smoked Nat Sherman’s

roadside amongst stands of ambrosia

and wild peony, and I would tell you

what he said, only it was long ago.

Ivey drew eighty pages of Asteraceae

in his guide, but I will never find

the name of these dried yellow petals

pilfered by felon winds.

My head covering unravels,

a white flag whipping across white-gray sky.

It leaves me bereft,

but able to pray with my ears.

Silence runs through

the house like seams of gold

mending a cracked kintsugi,

the bowl rendered precious

by its breaking.

A new vessel replaces the fractured one,

now filled.

Steam canopies

the room before vanishing.

Thunder barrows over our voices.

There are fields that hold fields that hold fields.

Blades of grass wind-bent to the ground.

Footfalls between now and the storm’s first scattered rain.

The Trouble with Belief

We think we know the best place

to gather chanterelles,

how to sit out lightning bursts

above timberline. I’ve been waiting

for autumn to start singing,

and meanwhile the ash and elm

have quietly gilded their leaves.

Every time I talk about the trouble with belief,

my friends look away. All I’m saying is

what could it mean that the robes we wear

can be taken off and on?

Or maybe it’s simple: trees go

from bare to bud, green leaf to gone

in tides of adornment and scarc...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• About the Author