Poet’s Statement: “Solastalgia” is a term coined to describe the experience of mourning environmental loss, of grieving your home while you still inhabit it.¹   An experience quickly becoming common to the majority of humans presently living — people of all languages, cultures, and beliefs.

This poem attempts to grapple honestly with what it means to remember (and to remember poetically) in an era where all that we claim to write in defense of is in danger of disappearing.  An era where concrete, human actions are required beyond art, to avert or at least mitigate an ecological collapse that could easily put an end to most of what inspires us to poetry, and to countless lives (human and otherwise) beyond that.  As such, it is at times less than poetic.  But it is also a call towards a new sort of poetry.²

Lines of Fissure

After “A Woman Dead in Her Forties,” Adrienne Rich

Say the rain falls thin as thunder
over vacant gardens.  Say the stars
are not just distant fires in which half-formed things
must burn 

and you’d be wrong, but 
say it anyway.  Keep your thought clenched
to a smooth syllable, pebble beneath the tongue, and I’ll choke down
what I could never tell you – that it is only on the gods
that rain can fall so lightly.  That for us, there is no garden
save for roots that clutch the flesh of corpses, and no gate
except some dog lies by it, waiting for years that trusted
apparition that will never
return home.      If this was wrong
                                          you would return home.
If this was wrong,
                                                       there would be home, still, to return to.   

Poet’s Statement: This poem was inspired by an avalanche class in which I learned the many different types of snow, and how to read the history of a winter season in the layers of the snowpack. While snow layers are dynamic, they also contain a fixed record of memory, like the rings of a tree or the fossils in layers of earth. 

Naturally, we humans may think of memory as something contained and encoded in our brains—as something we carry with us. But the woven synapses that fire to bring back images from our past don’t necessarily fire on their own. They often depend on us being in a certain place, stronger in its power to make us recall than even our own willpower to access our past.